Management by warm body

The idea of “management by warm body” is something like this:

• A company or firm generally over-staffs relative to the amount of work that truly needs to be done.
• While this creates an internal culture of lots of people staring at Instagram all day and collecting a paycheck, it also puts lots of warm bodies around a general physical space, i.e. cubicles.
• In this way, the “managerial tier” — who sit in offices around those cubicles — can emerge from the offices and say “Hey, you there — you there, whatever your name may be? Can you hop on this thing for me?”
• Basically, it creates a culture with no true connection between individuals — absentee management is the norm — and people can still constantly claim how insanely busy they are, but they always know they have a warm body somewhere nearby (or on Zoom/Slack/email) to toss deliverables over the fence at.

This all ties to the “Understaffed Myth,” whereby companies constantly claim to be so understaffed, i.e.:

• “Busy season”
• “So slammed”
• “So much is going on”
• “We’re all drowning”
• “I know you’re burning the candle at both ends”