Can Your Business Work Without Managers?

With the current technology and the increasingly efficient communication channels, there are fewer boundaries for business owners to start and grow their businesses. With this new work methodology, constant supervision and management is a thing of the past.

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Why work without managers?

There are two main reasons:

1) The reality is that some managers lack the technical background to effectively communicate with and manage their programmers.

Before founding my business, I worked at IBM and Intel, two giants of the tech world. I always disagreed with the fact that the project managers monitored the programmers’ work without having the necessary technical knowledge. I thought: “How can somebody who doesn’t understand what I’m doing tell me if it’s right or wrong?” As a consequence, those who performed their tasks quickly but with a low quality were given the whole credits.

Google creator Larry Page has said on several occasions: “Engineers shouldn’t be supervised by managers who lack technical knowledge.”

2) Programmers need working blocks of 3 to 5 uninterrupted hours of development to achieve their goals.

Programmers shouldn’t be disturbed in the middle of their working day to participate in a meeting with their boss. This significantly reduces their concentration, which may lead to a lower quality product.

The cost of meetings is significantly higher for programmers and designers. Meetings that require your programmers to attend should be meaningful and productive.

3 Essential tools for working without managers

1) Asana allows us to work without the need of using the email to communicate among ourselves.

As an internal policy, we decided to eliminate email communication several years ago. This is, without any doubt, one of the best decisions we have made towards productivity.

This prevents our email from becoming a list of tasks to be done. I personally received more than 70 emails per day and now I get only 5 daily, which are for external communications only (clients, suppliers, etc.)

2) Google for Work is an excellent tool for working remotely.

We have hundreds of processes in Google Doc that are detailed step by step with images, videos, audio, etc., which can help a new hire get up to speed at a blazing speed.

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3) WorkDay is a great tool for easier operations management (payment, expenditure, time management, etc.)

With the existing technologies, the operational management duties are automated and all the members have access to it in real time through the software (responsibilities, activities, tasks, schedules, etc.).

The most important thing is to focus on hiring proactive engineers and programmers. People who don’t need to be constantly supervised to do their job that who are “entrepreneurs” themselves. This is the key to the success in this new work mechanism.

Can Your Business Work Without Managers?