Doh! Working from Home Sparks Generation of ‘Mr Burns-type’ Bosses

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The working from home boom is creating a new generation of villainous bosses like “Mr Burns from The Simpsons”, a leading think tank has warned.
Britain’s workforce has more “monstrous” managers than ever before as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is claimed.
Previously calm, empathetic, and friendly bosses have become “the stuff of nightmares” as they attempt to reassert control and recreate the oversight of the office at home, it is said.
Tens of thousands of remote workers are now under intense supervision and feel “unable to use the bathroom” without being pulled to task, a 12-week independent study by the London-based policy institute Hack Future Lab has found.
The think tank, which analyses emerging trends to forewarn governmental organisations and public authorities about likely economic threats, warns that working from home (WFH) has triggered the largest reduction in trust between
employee and manager ever seen in modern times.
Its founder Terence Mauri said those who saw remote working as the silver lining of lockdown are now subject to paranoid and overbearing managers breathing down their necks throughout the day.
He said many managers were displaying the same emotional detachment as Mr Burns, Homer’s menacing boss who delights in – and frequently orchestrates – the downfall of his own employees.
This could have a “devastating” impact on workers’ long-term mental health and on the British economy, Mauri warns.
A drop in staff morale could prove the final straw for thousands of businesses already struggling under Covid-19 trading restrictions, he says.
The warnings come just days after it emerged that one-in-five firms admitted using or planning to install secret software to spy on staff working from home during the pandemic.

Such software can log how long workers take to read and reply to messages, check attendance at meetings — or even secretly film them from their screen.
“Covid-19 has accelerated the urgency for workers to feel trusted, especially when they are working remotely and under pressure,” Mauri said.
“Unfortunately, however, the challenges of WFH have triggered the reverse in that a substantial number of previously approachable managers have become, in the words of some employees with whom we interviewed, ‘monstrous’ and ‘the stuff of nightmares’.
“A rise in Mr Burns-type characters in the British workplace is clearly something that business owners must avoid for the sake of staff wellbeing and their own bottom line.”
Hack Future Lab interviewed 1,100 employees and 300 managers in full-time roles over 12 weeks, between late October and early January, via Zoom to determine the effect of home working on team trust.
Its report, entitled ‘Truth Decay’, found that 56 per cent of managers do not trust remote staff “as much as they should” and that “eyeball management” remains the best way of managing employees.
Of these, just over half (51 per cent) admit that Big Brother-type webcams would be a “helpful” way to check employee productivity.
Seven out of 10 employees, meanwhile, said their managers had become more controlling and demanding, and less empathetic and transparent as they had previously been in the office.
As a result, almost nine in ten remote workers (89%) have withheld an opinion, question or a concern because they are too scared to raise it with their manager.
Worryingly, one-in-five said they would be more likely to divulge a work-related issue with a stranger than with their boss.
Overall, just 44 per cent of employees feel that they are ‘often’ or ‘always’ trusted by their managers.
Mauri, of Hack Future Lab, said: “The Truth Decay findings highlight massive gaps between knowing and doing.

“Bosses must rise to the challenge to ensure today’s workers and future generations feel trusted.
“Trust needs to be earned and protected through positive measures, not through surveillance and controlling behaviour.”