New York Attorney General probes Charter over claims it forced staff to work in offices amid coronavirus pandemic US telco Charter Communications is facing an investigation from the New York State Attorney General for potentially putting employees at unnecessary risk during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. While AG Letitia James has yet to formally announce the probe, The Register understands a formal inquiry is already underway over …
Having spent a good part of my career in sales and marketing, I appreciate the advantages of F2F interactions but remote working becomes necessary some times. And I'm not even talking about the current pandemic situation. A decade or two ago, my company was doing a multiyear-long IT transformation project for a Top 5 UK Bank. The HQ and Dev teams were in London whereas the Ops team was in Manchester. It so happened that the Manchester premises was new and extremely short of space. There were only 3 meeting rooms for a total staff strength of 3500 people. Our counterparts in Manchester told us there was no chance of securing a meeting room, so we'd do all our ops work remotely from London. Then one day, the proverbial s**t hit the proverbial f*n in our software and the matter got escalated to the Head of the SBU. This gentleman was one of those guys who read emails after his PA printed them out. To put it mildly, he was a bit skeptical about technology tools even though he was heading a business that was almost entirely driven by technology. When he saw us in his office in London, he shouted at us, asking what the heck we were doing in London when there was a fire in Manchester. We tried telling him about space constraints in Manchester but nothing worked. Long story short, a team of five of us took a Virgin Pendolino from Euston, reached Manchester, entered the office, as expected couldn't find a free meeting room, sat wherever we could find a seat, dialed in to the same bridge that we'd have dialed in from London. Big boss was happy. Who cares about a few thousands of pounds wasted on train tickets and hotel rooms, eh?
It's clear that the Crazy Orange Village Idiot Disease is damaging not only the economy but also society.
Working from home used to be easy but not pleasant most of the time, but in today's working environment it's a mess. It used to be that technology helped you get the work done, nowadays technology is just there to make a profit - making people work from home means that you don't have to clean the office any longer, everyone has to clean their own offices, empty their own waste bins, and provide their own toilet paper - it's going to cut back on a lot of the corporate overheads so I expect that it will eventually be compulsory.
Just an FYI - we updated the corporate website to tell our customers and website visitors that we are self-isolating and have reduced the office staffing to comply with current regulations. Starting the next day we saw a 400% increase in email virus deliveries and infection attempts.
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