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It’s entirely possible you’re rolling your eyes while reading this.It might even piss you off a little.Before the pandemic, you likely thought that sort of flexibility was probably all but impossible in your job.But it’s difficult to imagine it if you can’t see it or why it works.Art+Logic is an example of a flexible culture that works in service of its employees, including those at the top.For example, employees are expected to be largely available during regular business hours but can create schedules that work for them, provided they are up front about it and hold to them.Art+Logic employees can work asynchronously because they are transparent about what needs to be done and who needs to do it, which, in turn, allows for more accountability.And part of that trust is granting real freedom to make small and occasionally large decisions about when work should be done.The culture at Art+Logic can’t be ported over to any company, because there’s no such thing as a magic formula.But size doesn’t ultimately matter when it comes to Art+Logic’s cultural success.That’s because they get the essential part of company culture right.So what makes for a healthy, flexible culture?We have a few areas where you can begin to survey your existing management culture and ways to change it, but this isn’t a checklist.You can use it to find your own route.Just keep in mind, the changes your company needs are rarely the ones that jump out at you as the most straightforward.Find the section that makes you feel the most vulnerable, the most seen, the most broken and exhausted.That’s where you need to start.People just kept promoting them, giving them more managerial responsibility, even though they didn’t understand what the hell they were supposed to be doing.Since 2017, the Nightingales have been working as a new sort of management consultant, specializing in growing companies.Every day, they spend time listening to how bad companies are at communicating and managing their employees.And then they try to fix it.It’s usually not malice, Melissa told us, referring to the way most companies are run.But a lot of that tactical stuff happens at the margins.The reason office work sucks is the same reason why remote work could also suck.It’s because management sucks.In their positions at Mozilla, the first teams the Nightingales managed were scattered all over the world.Melissa and Johnathan were tasked with trying to coordinate their team’s work while also avoiding assigning any tasks that would take place outside daylight hours in each employee’s respective time zone.Back then, Slack didn’t exist.Collaboration was really hard, Johnathan said.We were just kind of making it up, Melissa added.And we kept getting more and more mandates from our superiors.The pay was better, too.Most employees would say yes and then immediately find themselves in the managerial deep end with little or no training.But again, it’s not out of malice.It’s out of ignorance.Nobody told them how to do it.This practice isn’t limited to any industry, but the Nightingales argue that it’s especially pervasive at tech companies.They started their company, Raw Signal, based out of Toronto, to try to diagnose the problem in the wild.But it was worse than they thought.A skilled manager will approach each remote employee differently.They’ll offer trust and space or attention and guidance, depending on the employee’s needs.In short, they’ll actively, dynamically manage.And without training, they often manage on one of two extremes.Employees are left desperate for feedback, sending Slack messages into the wind.All of this was true before the pandemic, when people were still largely working in the office.It will live and die with middle management.When people talk about remote work, I hear, ‘We can work less and still be productive,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, true.If I live in fear that if I don’t have enough eye contact or enough Slack messages with my boss I might get fired, working fewer hours will not help.But how do you tell someone who’s been doing a job for five years, maybe even ten, that they’ve missed the point of their job this whole time?People may be bad managers out of ignorance, but that doesn’t mean they’re blameless.We’ve seen women who’ve had pay adjusted simply because a manager woke up, Johnathan said.The reason she was underpaid on the team was not because her boss was cackling in the corner.Some of the work has to be simply realizing that in most modern organizations, management has become something to tack onto someone’s existing job description, like a high school teacher getting extra money to coach high school volleyball.Alternately, management is used as a way to reward workers who distinguish themselves for their productivity, whether at sales, writing grants, data analysis, you name it.But productive people are not always good managers.They end up in those positions because most companies don’t actually value good management enough to take the time to identify its qualities and then recruit and retain employees with them.Back then, people often dealt with bad management by expanding the org chart with even more badly trained managers.Now we deal with it by ignoring it.And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as just the way it is, the less they’re going to value management in general.Otherwise, managers will continue to feel like deadweight, no matter how flexible an attitude you embrace.How many people with no real aptitude or investment have taken on the responsibility because there’s no other way to distinguish oneself?How many feel they’d love to devote more time to managing their team, but find they have so little time and space to dedicate to it beside their other work obligations?In other words, maybe some of your managers shouldn’t be managers.Maybe you shouldn’t be a manager.Maybe you’re not a manager, have never thought of yourself as a manager, but actually have the aptitude for it.Managing has been pegged to promotion for so long it’s eclipsed what’s actually vital about the position.It’s not about power.It’s about figuring out how to actually create the conditions for your team to do their best work.That work is often invisible, but your company should be treating it as invaluable.What Does Management Look Like Now?People have felt adrift, anxious, and unmanaged in their work for years.So now it’s time to reconsider what management’s been missing and how to reintegrate it into the fully or flexibly remote future.Corine Tan, Andrew Zhou, and Sid Pandiya stumbled upon this realization almost by accident.Pandiya and Zhou worked in engineering and product, and Tan was in business development and marketing.Even when in an office, they noticed that their jobs were increasingly isolated, taking place primarily on screens.So they formed a company, called Sike Insights, to study remote work.What do you love/hate about remote work?They were in the early stages of data analysis.And then the pandemic hit.It’s crazy, Tan told us.We have this whole spectrum of data.At first it’s like, ‘Remote work is great!’ then, ‘Whoa, global pandemic has changed everything, this is pretty stressful,’ and then, ‘I onboarded at my company six months ago, and I’ve never met a single human I work with.’ The data Sike Insights collected offered a bleak picture.Over ninety hours of Zoom calls with 110 different companies and their employees, they found that most workplaces were buckling under the pressure of forced work from home.People were Zoom fatigued, but more than that, they were struggling to connect emotionally with their teams.Somebody we interviewed summed it up perfectly, Zhou said.They told us they were ‘talking more and saying less.’  The emotional disconnect was creating anxiety but also sucking all of the small, intangible joys out of the job.They found that remote managers they surveyed had an average of about 4.87 direct reports.That might not sound like much, but it was overwhelming most managers as they attempted to deal with 5 different emotionally complex human beings, all under stress and with their own needs and demands.Worse yet, 21.5 percent of the remote managers they spoke with had less than one year of management experience when mandatory working from home began.As a result, everyone was suffering.To be a good manager, you need to be emotionally intelligent, Pandiya told us.The results are then shared with managers in order to synthesize what the Kona team described as a general vibe as to how people are feeling.Managers can also chart the emotional temperature of their team over time in order to arrive at a sense of how a project or a particular set of policies may affect the team.The platform also asks employees to answer questions about work style and then, if granted permission, uses artificial intelligence to analyze employee communication over platforms like public Slack channels.Kona then creates a personality profile of the employee that they can see and, if they want, make it public for other employees to use.The hope, the team told us, is that with enough honest data, Kona can help workers, especially managers, communicate more effectively in real time.He described other plausible scenarios, including Kona pops in to tell you that the email you’re looping back on is not urgent and, in fact, Rebecca is currently in six hours of meetings and feeling stressed today.How about sending tomorrow?A platform that feeds off the emotional data of employees is incredibly fraught.Some employees might not mind telling a bot what their mood is for the day and won’t hesitate to let others know when they feel like crap.Many will find it unnaturally, annoyingly invasive.But that, the founders argue, is exactly the point.Opacity and lack of communication are at the very core of so many of today’s management problems.Most people are flying blind, tiptoeing around their company trying not to get fired, left to divine the emotions of their colleagues and superiors from vague blocks of text.We talk about company culture all the time, but what we’re talking about is so vague, Zhou said.Imagine actually being able to analyze your culture.Say, an overzealous manager needlessly pushes up the due date of a project by a week, causing his employees to drop everything and crash it.The experience leads everyone to feel miserable and the end result suffers.This might feel niche right now, but companies will adapt to this kind of management, Pandiya said.And ten years from now those who didn’t embrace this hybrid style will look like dinosaurs.Take the slightly less invasive example of Microsoft’s Leadership Insights, available to managers in companies that use Microsoft Teams.Now she still sends her emails between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m.But she schedules them all for the morning, during her team’s active hours.Or look at the data, and see that they were still reading and responding during these times, and change her behavior accordingly.You can use them to inform and transform your own behavior, but only if you actually have a vested interest in managing with more empathy and intentionality.We’re all figuring out what our jobs are going to look like in this new reality, and if we do it on our own, remote work will continue to look like the anxious, endless jumble of the pandemic year.The process is going to require a significant amount of experimentation and grace, communication and transparency.But the way we help each other do it, especially as managers, is to understand that everyone, up and down the org chart, is a full, messy, complex, vulnerable, and struggling human in need of support, affirmation, and boundaries.You can teach others that posture.But you also have to learn it for yourself.You’ve heard these statistics, or something approximating them, before.No matter how many diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops your organization requires, if your leaders and managers aren’t truly diverse, then the monoculture will prevail.The word monoculture comes from the agricultural world, where it is used to describe growing or raising one specific type of crop or animal.