I had a moment yesterday that I was writing a comment about and realised that I could use a learning moment. Sorry, this is not “I quit my unfulfilling job” vibes (did that last year!) But rather “welp I'm in middle management during the most collectively stressful and antiwork movement of my life, how to make things better”. My company is awesome and I do manage to find things to like about my work, I'd like to keep it going!
Can't give too many details but basically our company is the very definition of middle management as we function as an intermediary between freelancers and corporations who need them. Think Mechanical Turk like jobs but paid 10-40x better and run by a super small company. That being said, I'm sure no freelancer has the time or interest to look it up and see how small we are, and we don't make people rich for sure, it's very much sidegigs for most people tho a few talented freelancers might make enough to have some nice monthly wages working 2 days a week. I was a freelancer myself and always enjoyed getting gigs here since they were low effort and high pay, but it's not something I saw myself doing for a living and the employer is just a faceless page like Upwork + some emails from a few people, you know? I didn't imagine that 5 people run everything, found out when they called me in for full time. Hell, I spent the first 2 months being mega suspicious and waiting for the other ball to drop before I realised that it's just nice hardworking people working in a super niche field that is known to be sketchy and exploitative but they choose not to be.
Anyway, so I found myself a faceless manager assigning tasks by email to people who I'll never meet and… It's been harsh. I try to be as nice and human as possible, and some seem nice in emails, but 8/10 they do a… Pretty shitty job. I sometimes redo the whole job myself on my own time if I'm qualified for it. A lot of the bad jobs come from people who used to do good jobs, but understably I guess when you get paid anyway you shit on company time. It's pretty bad since the bad jobs then need someone to fix them, fixing pays less than originally doing them, so everyone is all around upset. I don't think it's the worker's lack of skill so much as… Let's face it, it's a faceless portal and you're part of a large pipeline whose end result you can't see or often even predict. Job meaning satisfaction is not something you can get from it. It's predictable that you wouldn't do your best or be loyal for any reason.
What are some good ways to get people motivated in this case? Pay is not one, since we already pay quite well. I'm not sure how we could be less of a faceless task provider to offer more satisfaction for the soul and get people motivated. We can't exactly leak the pipeline to show how their work improves some prodicra as we have an NDA with the clients. Other managers are just stricter when a bad job's been done and make them redo repeatedly, but personally I would find it frustrating (and getting feedback from a faceless person is, well, intimidating I think. )
TLDR if you have any my gig was awesome and here is why stories, I would love to take notes.