Your boss has a tremendous effect on what your job actually looks like from day-to-day. They influence your feelings about coming to work, and what your career path for the immediate future will look like. Your relationship with them is so crucial that you have to become skilled at managing up to keep your career moving along smoothly. Spotting a bad boss while working from home can be difficult, but the stakes are even higher.

With unemployment rising and hiring freezes all around, you have to find ways to thrive in a work-from-home environment while working for a bad boss. Because a majority of the workforce is remote, they can hide in the shadows. Working from home under a bad boss has a more significant impact on your mental health because you are isolated from your other co-workers. Companies have increased their monitoring processes, which causes fear to reach out to co-workers for advice, especially using company equipment.

What are the dangers of working for a bad boss when you are working from home?

Working for a bad boss under the best circumstances is full of challenges. Being remote will exasperate them, and the damage it will do to your career path increases exponentially. Working from home for a bad boss is like darkness for cockroaches. It is easier for them to hide. It is hard to shine a light on them to get them to scatter away. They can effortlessly prop themselves up while pushing you down. Here are five dangers of working remotely for a bad boss.

Your ability to network is limited or eliminated while working from home.

Networking around your organization is vital to mitigating the damage a bad boss causes. When you can’t network, or don’t, your reputation, capabilities, and contribution depend wholly on how your boss is promoting you. Bad bosses do a poor job of elevating their team because their focus is to make themselves look good. Sometimes they do this by making you look incompetent so they can be the hero. Other times bad bosses do this so they can keep the spotlight on themselves.

Networking is possible when working remotely with some minor tweaks. The only way to edit the story your bad boss is writing is to network. These things can help you network while working from home:

• Find ways to get involved with cross-departmental committees
• Make an appearance at after-hours Zoom meetings and participate
• Conduct your own public relations campaign to surface your accomplishments
• Find ways to save the company money, time, or resources and bring those ideas forward

Bad bosses who work remotely are oblivious to the daily happenings of their team.

When there are interrogations around performance results, they immediately throw you under the bus. It happens regardless of what the truth is. Working remotely can amplify the issue because your boss is even more out of touch with reality. By not being in the office, they can’t observe what is happening, giving them more incentive to make stuff up. With the fear of furlough weighing on everyone, bad bosses are increasing the behaviors they feel make them appear more essential.

Overcoming an oblivious boss when working remotely isn’t as hard as you may think. The tactics that help with this type of boss are best practices for managing your career anyway.

• Send daily recaps of accomplishments or status updates
• What gets measured gets improved so identify the metrics that matter to the business and measure your performance on those metrics
• Keep a daily journal of highlights and lowlights so you can easily provide updates when asked
• Calibrate your priorities with your boss to make sure you are focused on what matters

Working from home gives a bad boss greater control over information.

Conference calls and Zoom meetings make it impossible for multiple people to speak at once. It eliminates the ability to have sidebar conversations. There is no water cooler or breakroom gossip, and you aren’t passing co-workers in the hallway to exchange information quickly. Remote working creates an opportunity for your bad boss to exert more control over the flow of information. They can more easily be the author of a fictitious story that quickly becomes the truth. Because you are working from home, you may never know the story they are creating.

It can get tricky to pull information out of an organization if communication isn’t a priority. Here are a few suggestions to help.

• Work with HR or Internal Communications to suggest an internal newsletter
• Start a conversation with coworkers on other teams by asking how they are doing or what they are working on
• Schedule your own after-hours gathering

If you thought your bad boss was absent before, remote working makes it worse.

Open door policies fade away quickly. You call and get no answer, and emails go without a response. Internal communication tools perpetually show them away for hours at a time. Your absent leader has become even more absent, and because you are working for home, you can’t roam the office to find them. When a bad boss is working remotely, they decide which meetings to show up to and whom to interact with. It leaves you feeling unsupported, a lack of clarity around expectations, and zero guidance for how to complete your work.

Thriving with an absent boss while working remote isn’t as daunting as it may seem. These tips will help.

• Communicate your projects, progress, and key points
• Seek to understand the critical projects they are involved in that may demand their full attention
• Be proactive by not waiting for your boss to tell you what needs done
• Be clear on your own expectations for coaching and feedback

Working from home makes a bad boss’s listening skills much worse.

The inability to listen is the most damaging characteristic a bad boss can have. Because they have poor listening skills or chose not to listen to the person speaking, they never truly get to the root of the issue. Remote working amplifies the poor listening skills of a bad boss. Now that your conversations are over the phone, chat, or Zoom meetings, it is easier for your boss to multi-task. They nod in agreement or make “uh-huh” sounds, which makes you feel like you are getting the agreement. Later on, you realize they weren’t listening when they deny knowing anything or conveniently forget you warned them of something earlier.

Sometimes the bad boss will hear a few words, quickly interrupt you thinking they know everything they need to, give a solution, and rush you off the phone. In doing so, they don’t fully understand the problem, and as a result, have a higher chance of wasting time because the solution doesn’t solve the problem. Working from home with a bad boss who has poor listening skills means you have no chance of being productive or effective.

Overcoming a bad boss with poor listening skills is hard but not impossible. You have to put forth a greater effort to document and recap discussions. Here are some suggestions to help work better remotely with a bad boss.

• Reflect on your listening skills to make sure the bad listener isn’t you
• Send a recap email outlining the agreed upon next steps
• Highlight the magnitude of your message from the start so the importance is understood

Working remotely for a bad boss is far more terrible than it is when working in the office. Many companies are considering making remote work permanent. As a result, it is critical to learn how to work for a bad boss while working from home to avoid derailing your career path.

Last updated on June 14th, 2020 at 04:49 am