Meetings should be like salt - a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.
Jason FriedRead
That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The real challenge of remote work is recognizing employee burnout, not productivity.
This quote highlights the irony faced by managers in a remote work environment. While they may worry that their employees are not working hard enough when working from home, the more pressing issue is that these employees may end up working excessively and experiencing burnout. Without the ability to observe their team members in person, managers can struggle to identify signs of overwork, emphasizing the need for open communication and check-ins.
Themes
Remote WorkBurnoutManagementProductivityCommunication
In practice
Example use cases
In a team meeting discussing remote work policies, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of monitoring employee wellness.
More from Jason Fried
All quotes →Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it's improving the thing you already thought of six months - or six years - ago. It's the work of work.
Jason FriedRead
Similar quotes
My feeling about work is it's much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa.
Alan CummingRead
Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.
Van JonesRead
Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
Khalil GibranRead
The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
W. Edwards DemingRead
I get to go to work and come home with something interesting or enriching or astonishing.
Diane SawyerRead
The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.
Orson Scott CardRead