The Crisis of Modern Supervision: Seeing People Without Seeing the Work

Traditional supervision was built on a simple assumption: if I can see the people, I can understand the work. This assumption worked for decades in face-to-face environments, with more linear routines and less operational complexity. In the current scenario, it not only fails but creates serious distortions.
Today, many leaders can see presence, availability, and quick response, but they cannot see flow, quality, bottlenecks, and cadence. The result is a crisis of modern supervision: managers observe social cues of activity but lose sight of the real work. This degrades decisions, increases noise, fuels biases, and weakens performance, even in competent teams.

1. What has changed in work and why supervision has fallen behind
Three changes have made presence-based supervision insufficient.
First, work has become fragmented. Instead of long execution cycles, the day has become a sequence of interruptions and micro-demands. Microsoft, analyzing data from the Work Trend Index, points out that employees are interrupted every two minutes during core work hours by meetings, emails, or chats.

Second, the work has become more indirect. A significant portion of time is consumed by coordination, alignments, and system maintenance tasks. Asana estimates that 60% of work time can be spent on work about work, that is, coordination and communication activities that are not the qualified delivery itself.
Third, the work has become distributed. With hybrid and remote models, visual contact has ceased to be a reliable indicator of contribution. When supervision tries to compensate for this loss with observation of digital presence, it is trading one problem for another.

2. The central error: measuring social visibility instead of operational visibility
Modern supervision requires distinguishing between two things:
social visibility: who shows up, who responds, who is in meetings, who is online
operational visibility: what is being done, what stage it is at, where it gets stuck, how much rework there is, how the workflow behaves
When the company only has social visibility, it tends to reward availability and punish focus. The employee who works in long blocks, solves complex problems, and delivers in depth may seem less “present” than someone who lives in alignments and messages.
This distorts performance, encourages theatrics of productivity, and increases the cost of coordination.

3. The effect of biases: proximity, presence, and unfair evaluation

Lack of operational visibility opens space for biases.

The Harvard Business Review describes proximity bias, in which leaders favor those who are physically closer, linked to the assumption that in-person visibility means greater productivity. In hybrid environments, this bias transforms: instead of physical proximity, proximity of schedule emerges, who is in more meetings, who appears more in the chat, who is more “accessible.”

The result is management that may be well-intentioned, but is not accurate. The manager does not see the work, so they judge peripheral signals.

4. The Managerial Cost: More Demands, Less Cause Management
When the actual work is not visible, management relies on substitute mechanisms:
more meetings to reduce uncertainty
more checkpoints to gain a sense of control
more demands for status updates
more parallel controls to “guarantee”
This creates a paradox: the less operational visibility, the more the manager pushes for communication. But excessive communication reduces execution time, increases fragmentation, and worsens the original problem.
This is how supervision becomes overload, both for the manager and the team, and the work becomes even less observable.

5. The Human Impact: Loss of Engagement and Useful Energy
When supervision is based on presence and not on flow, the team loses clarity and perceived fairness. Good professionals start working to appear productive, not to produce. Trust falls, autonomy shrinks, and engagement is affected.

Gallup points out that disengagement cost $438 billion in 2024, linked to a drop in global engagement and loss of productivity. In organizations where supervision becomes noise, the cost is not just cultural. It’s economic.

6. What modern supervision should be: telemetry, context, and direction
• Modern supervision doesn’t mean controlling people; it means making work observable so that leadership can:

• guide priorities based on data
• reduce bottlenecks and rework
• protect focus time
• balance workloads and dependencies
• recognize contribution without relying on presence
• This requires telemetry of work. Not telemetry to punish, but telemetry to direct the system.

7. How Productivity Radar solves the crisis: seeing the work, not just the people
• Productivity Radar directly addresses the core of the problem: it transforms supervision from an exercise in perception to an evidence-driven process.

• Continuous operational visibility
Radar allows you to understand how work is distributed, where time is invested, and how the flow behaves throughout the day and week. Instead of interpreting social cues, leadership begins to see operational patterns.

• Reduction of work about work and coordination noise
By making the flow observable, management reduces the need for status meetings and manual checkpoints, addressing real bottlenecks and eliminating time-consuming redundancies.

• Fairer and less biased decisions
With work data, contribution assessment no longer depends on presence, proximity, or volume of messages. This improves recognition, feedback, and workload distribution, preserving good professionals.

• Supervision as direction, not surveillance
Radar repositions supervision in its correct place: operational direction, continuous improvement, and strategic management of human capital.

• The crisis of modern supervision is not about a lack of leadership. It’s about a lack of visibility of the real work in a more complex, fragmented, and distributed environment. When the organization learns to see the work, supervision ceases to be about demanding and returns to being about management.