BT CEO orders staff: Back to the office or risk 'disciplinary action' BT is ordering thousands of staff across the globe to return to the office three days a week or risk disciplinary procedures. In a document dispatched to affected workers of the British telecommunications giant, some of whom are not happy with the change of direction, BT Group CEO Philip Jansen talks of the new "smart working …
Couple of things.
"There is some concern that more will work from home on Fridays."
Why would that be a problem? If you want that "connection" then surely you need everyone in on the same days?
Secondly, if you piss people off like this then all the dynamic / good ones will simply go somewhere else. Which is probably what they want, as they are going through a spat of Voluntary Redundancies, and this saves them some £££ if they leave on their own. Only problem is you are left with the plodders.
BT has been focused on trimming it's headcount (and pension liabilities) ever since the original dotcom bubble finished bursting back in the early Noughties.
Some of the packages which they were offering in those first rounds of redundancies were insane - if memory serves, it was a lump sum plus one month of pay per year of service - and the latter was uncapped.
The amount of institutional knowledge which BT lost as a result of this was phenomenal - and this was followed by a second way of departures by people who were fed up of having lots of extra work dumped on them.
Oddly, all of these cost-cutting exercises have never really improved their share price.
It's almost as if having your workloads increase while also having an axe permanently quivering over your head doesn't actually help to motivate your staff to be productive or innovative...
That’s generically true of all DB schemes. Where I am, three former CEOs are taking their ludicrous DB payout while contributions by working DB pension staffers would not be enough to cover those three takers; let alone the rest of the former population.
The situation is that bad that DB buyout offers are being made!
People have been leaving BT in drones for months. At least half the people who apply to our current vacancies are people who are currently at BT and looking at leaving or people who have recently left. I doubt there are many good ones left at this point!
That explains the announcement, those left need close managerial supervision.
The biggest drivers of this are the folks who feel the need to socialize. They like being around others chatting about nothing. Meanwhile, those of us actually doing work can get more done without the constant interruption's of how Mike's son is getting on in Uni or how Judy and her baby are doing.
As if the quality of your work depends on you being seen, your location, or whether you are wearing trousers.
"The biggest drivers of this are the folks who feel the need to socialize... those of us actually doing work can get more done without the constant interruption's of how Mike's son is getting on in Uni or how Judy and her baby are doing"
That's what Teams and Workplace (Faecebook for Business) are for. BT have embraced both with a vengeance... and you thought your inbox was full!
You missed pictures of dogs... and senior management swanning round opening new offices (while depots, where the real business goes on, the 'fix' for dodgy heating is your own personal fan heater)
The HR director (no idea how they got to be director as they were bloody useless) at my last company was getting pissy about WFH in 2021 but they were still WFH more often than not and would rarely answer emails or pick up the phone except when they were actually in the office....
Part of the fun of getting paid at work is knowing just how much time they are paying you to waste sat in pointless meetings (or on teams calls these days), re-doing someone elses job as they messed up or simply dropping a log :)
https://workpoop.com/
One upside of open plan offices is you can see all the people who are on the SAME teams call.
I work in an industry where I have to deal with large and/or dangerous things so WFH didn't last very long.
BT has an amazing portfolio of properties, mostly empty.
They can (re) introduce telecottages. Staff select a site close to them, so short commute.
It’s then up to managers to tour the locations where their reports are working. As if they ever would.
Telecottages are well provisioned for conference calls.
And hints to a far more rational team building strategy. Hire locally to allow face to face meetings with white boards.
Any gobshite who thinks it's acceptable to set up food banks for their own employees to excuse them from paying them a proper wage can get f**ked.
I'm sure many of us would like our own "connection" with the clown in a more physical manner than just a phone call.
Solidarity to the poor bastards who have to suffer his bullshine.
Setting up food banks for staff that's a f**king disgrace
https://bigissue.com/news/employment/bt-food-bank-community-pantry-own-staff/
What's even more egregious everyone's putting their prices up and making record profits again so tell me how are these companies hurting? they're not they'll just make less profit and that's fine its how it should, like the energy companies they can simply charge less make a little less profit
PAY YOUR BLOODY STAFF PROPERLY THEY'RE WHO MAKE YOU THIS MONEY
You need a reason to fire people, unless you don't intend to fill their role with anyone else. Not that I don't expect to see some form of constructive dismissal case come out of this, but it's harder to argue that you can only work from home when you used to work in an office. Best of luck to them though.
>Not that I don't expect to see some form of constructive dismissal case come out of this, but it's harder to argue that you can only work from home when you used to work in an office. Best of luck to them though.
What would happen if they all went back to the office and were less productive - by any important KPIs - on those days. Actually proving that office work was less efficient and costing the company money...
I think it depends what your job role is. If you need to interact with a lot of people (and that can include technical roles) then it's a lot harder to do the job completely from home. Can recall many cases where a fruitless & endless email/telephone exchange on a design issue was resolved by a face-to-face - at the same time getting a better understanding of where the other parties were coming from. So I can see the advantage of hybrid working. YMMV
Yes, but that does not necessarily mean 3 days a week.
I have almost always worked for foreign companies, and since the late nineties with my boss in another country. As technology improved, we got a lot of work done with videocalls. Latterly I took to going to head office for about 1 week a month - sometimes just me and about one trip in 3 with my colleagues from other countries all coming at the same time.
Some people didn't like it but it worked quite well in my case.
This one. Yes. Had that previously, the dining table is not a suitable office. No, I did not have space to set up a home office desk or somesuch.
Also the others in the other / above comments. The inflexible approach ist stupid, forcing people to be 100% (or any X%) present is not that useful. Having a day (or so) per week / month when you can sit together with your team can be good. At times this makes things sooo much easier. I also like it on a purely communicative / personal level, I like my colleagues, and chatting a bit with them about non-work stuff.
For some tasks, like sitting and working on some code / designing a new part of our DB / trying to write a coherent document (or when I am forbidden to actually meet colleagues face to face due to the pandemic, only allowed video calls) I can totally do that from home, and the coffee is better there.
I've talked about this before - I live in a flat, which means I've got a herd of baby elephants (aka: young and overly energetic children) running around above me, a crying baby to one side and someone who likes to do DIY on the other side.
Plus a basketball court on one side (which is surprisingly popular with international students at 2am) and a grassy play area on the other side, which is generally filled during the day with a motley collection of pre-teen kids frolicking on the slides/swings/roundabout while communicating with each other entirely through high-pitched and prolonged screams.
And here I am, stuck in the middle with El Reg. Thankfully, I actually prefer to work with headphones on ;)
For me, I think the main concern is that we've lost a lot of the "personal connection" when it comes to the people we work with. For all that working in an office can be significantly more distracting than being at home, there's also real benefit to being able to talk to people face-to-face.
And I also suspect it's a lot harder for new starters, too - anecdotally, the level of churn we've seen in new-starters feels higher, and I can't help but wonder if that's related to the fact that there's less of an informal support network for them...
The commute is a large part of why people are unhappy with being forced back into the office and that stems from decades of centripetal movement of offices into city centres. The citiy centres become so heavily populated during the day that they need increasingly larger areas to house the staff and that means longer commutes.
Perhaps a happy medium would be to close down the central offices and replace them with several smaller hubs, possibly shared working spaces, located closer to where employees live. That way commutes can be short so that hybrid working would be more acceptable, those like yourself unable to find a satisfactory environment at home can be provided for and we can dispense with a mode of life which is environmentally unsustainable.
This is exactly the point and something that really winds me up.
Working from generally favours those who are further up the pay scales because they have room to create a workspace. They can have the proper disks and multiple monitors. They have larger houses so interruptions are less likely.
I work from home, initially enforced in 2020 then through choice with a new employer.
The caveats making it possible:
I have a suitable office.
I have the equipment I need, partly provided, partly supplied by myself.
There are not young children screaming disrupting calls.
I go into the head office once a month,.
The downsides:
Even with Teams etc, it still can be lonely.
It can be more difficult to "leave work" and just switch off.
If I want to tinker with my stuff or do something, it is in the same place I have just spent all day working!!!.
Not everyone can work from home and I have been on numerous calls where it is almost impossible to hear what is being said due to background noise of family, pets, builders etc.
I do stuff with customers who are pocking around on a laptop and track pad so everything takes twice as long.
"Does this mean it would be hard verging on impossible to develop something as complex as an entire OS working completely from home?"
No, because you didn't pay attention to their point. There are jobs it's impossible to do from home (operating large and dangerous equipment in a large group). There are ones that are very easy to do from home (solitary work where everyone you communicate with is in a different time zone). Now which of those better fits a development project that doesn't have an office or even a central company? So now that we've established that that can be easily done from home, it's time for you to learn that not every job is like that of a Linux developer. There are some jobs, including technical ones, where all the people you're interacting with are not working independently of you and may be located somewhat close to you, and in those cases, there can be advantages to working in person with them. In some cases, those advantages are so large as to become virtual requirements. In other cases, the advantages are small and don't overcome the costs to individuals of commuting.
You can't decide which applies to your job based only on what you'd like to do. It takes collection and analysis of productivity data, or failing that because it's rarely done, consideration of everyone involved and the costs and benefits of each model across the group. Insisting that there's nothing good about working in person can be as incorrect as the manager who insists everyone come in because that's what he wants, and that's all the reason you should need.
Can recall many cases where a fruitless & endless email/telephone exchange on a design issue was resolved by a face-to-face - at the same time getting a better understanding of where the other parties were coming from. So I can see the advantage of hybrid working.
Never underestimate the problem solving powers of the coffee machine and the fag break.
I don't smoke, but I regularly join smoking colleagues on their smoke break.
Same on my current gig. Goal is to turn back to the clock to 3 in, 2 out - which they had before the pandemic.
The cheery messages announcing this by the HR zombies make me throw up in my mouth a little. The return of the Type A personalities and their projection of "I can't stand to be alone because I might have to start thinking about my own inadequacies and the emptiness of my life - or worse do actual work" converted into "misery loves company". Return of 3 hours of commuting. Unproductive time. Hours of "let's have another pointless meeting". Unproductive time. Some middle manager phonesturbating at the top of their voice so everybody hears about their importance, going straight through even the best ANR headphones. Unproductive time.
I've pretty much decided that I will count commuting as part of my 8 hour day. Meaning I will be in the office for 5 hours - and bill the client the full day. If they decide they can do without me even in this tight job market (in my area at least), well the contract was almost up anyway.
Commuting is the worst and wastes so much fuel its defiantly better for the environment if we don't drive to work or school.
Phonesturbating - I'm adding that to my dyslexicon, how is this for its definition "Phonesturbating - The act of a middle manager loudly having a phone call so the whole office can here all about their self-importance, in the guise of doing work"
Good on you! I wish I could but it's still just a smidge out of reach right now.
Sadly a lot of good talent will be lost this way, there's a lot of smart people with a decades of great experience and it's just going to go to waste with this short term, "get back to the factory floor" mentality.
I was never allowed to work from home as despite being the key cyber security staffer in our company it was deemed too risky (by others - not me) for me to work from home despite my changes allowing 11,000 others to do so.
During the pandemic I was regularly one of two people in our building which usually had 3000 in it.
Now it's filling up again, but I'm keeping the options open, some of our departments genuinely struggled to adjust to new ways of working but this was largely due to managers who had never been told how to manager staff remotely being expected to do a gold standard job of it. As much as I'd love to blame managers here - nobody has trained them how to adjust so staff are happy and supported at home.
That being said I seem to have managed fine, my team loved it and are still working from home when they want, on average they come in every couple of weeks for a day, basically an excuse for a chat with me.
"some of our departments genuinely struggled ...As much as I'd love to blame managers here - nobody has trained them how to adjust so staff are happy and supported at home."
You could blame them for not taking the initiative to consult with other managers who, it's implied, succeeded. Maybe your company could learn from that who are its better and worse managers.
"Phonesturbating" such a great term!
Every place I have worked so far has one of these phonesturbators. The worst is when I'm on a call with support and we can't hear each other so end up speaking louder and the phonesturbator gets louder too. Then later on during the day they will wander over and complain that we haven't sorted out the issue quick enough even though a major hurdle was trying to communicate coz shouty mc shouty was playing bs bingo on the phone.
"WFH really is a cultural problem and people need to get back to offices with some kind of frequency I believe. If they don't the rot will seep in, new starters will be left dangling, buy-in to the company will diminish."
If you really believe that post it with your handle, you coward.
"onboarding" is a problem. Yes.
I had two new trainees during the pandemic. One worked out, the other one didn't. I'm almost sure we could have kept him / had a better working relationship if we had met semi-regularly in person. Yes, this is anecdotal evidence. It is backed up by other team leads though (not only in my company) I talked to about these things.
"Onboarding" failures when new starters are remote can sometimes be linked to lack of proper documentation / learning resources.
In IT, documentation is, unfortunately, often the last thing to be done (if at all!) and so is often lacking detail or outdated - remote "onboarding" shines a great massive spotlight on that area of failure
Once upon a time I had a new employee assigned to me. Unexpectedly as nobody told me he was coming until he arrived. He only lasted a few weeks; shortly after he started it was announced the company was relocating about 200 miles away. Maybe remote working would have suited him better. Just a counter-anecdote.
"...buy-in to the company will diminish."
What?
This is work we are talking about not a bloody religion. If they want people to feel that they have a stake in the enterprise start by paying them well and treat them as if they matter.
We've all seen the Apple employees wetting themselves with excitement when Apple releases a new 'phone, laptop, opens a new shop etc but the cynic in me thinks that might just be a sign that people want to keep their jobs.
Me, I worked to live I did not live to work and I never "bought in " to the companies I worked for. It was strictly a business arrangement.
"WFH really is a cultural problem"
It's a cultural issue, certainly. The issue is, does your company culture support it or not. Let me demonstrate:
My daughter had a job for a few years where the HQ was about 150 miles (Cambridge area) or more away but par of the reason she got the job was that it entailed frequent site visits around the M62 corridor, the rest of the time working from home. She could visit the office once ever few weeks.
The next job was office based but started just before the pandemic. A similar sort of line (clinical trials) but this company demanded presenteeism most days. Interestingly the collaborating sites were mostly out of the UK so remote collaboration was essential. Needless to say, once the pandemic struck they went to remote working. A few months ago the company decided they needed to go back to being on site. She handed in her notice. (It was a difficult commute & I was surprised she even took the job in the first place!)
Hew new job is entirely WFH. It seems to be the way this international company operates. She didn't even know where the company's UK address was until I researched it. Interviewing and even onboarding was done remotely.
So there we have a spectrum ranging from working entirely remotely to working very largely from the office. The choice doesn't even correlate well with the nature of collaboration involved. What other factor can be involved other than company culture?
"WFH really is a cultural problem and people need to get back to offices with some kind of frequency I believe. If they don't the rot will seep in, new starters will be left dangling, buy-in to the company will diminish."
I agree with this 100%. Thankfully I don't give a rats ass about downvotes because I know you are all wrong and I am right along with the poster of this comment :-P
We're finding that with new recruits at the moment - the natural settling-in during the first few weeks/months from having your colleagues around you all the time just isn't happening for thenm Some new recruits have promptly left again as a result.
Established employees who aren't needing to form new connections are doing fine remotely. It's meaning that everyone is having to try that little bit harder to help new recruits settle in than we used to.
In BT culture, if you ever need to talk to HR, then you are the problem. They are obsessively overprotective of their managers. Anyone who complains or raises concern or gives critical feedback are marked and targeted. A couple of months back one of the MDs was berating in the town hall meeting about why people had not-good feedbacks in the culture survey. He was pissed off at the non-managers (read: bloody commoners) for saying they were not adequately satisfied with their managers. BT's instances of making life miserable for the "moaners" are just classic. Does anyone in this country gives a two fuck about employee rights?
Son… the _only_ “buy-in” a company deserves is directly related to how much they pay, how good the working conditions are, how annoying higher management is, and how difficult it is to get to and from work. WFH means that working conditions are under local control, there is no commute, higher management has problems causing trouble. As long as the pay is adequate, “buy-in” will be good. You start forcing people back to the office for no good reason, and watch “buy-in” plummet.
But, hey, carry on.
Prior to the boot from my last employer*, we could WFH if required to be home for something that needed our presence (Or advance notice of a major snow dump**). Certainly they got the full 4/8 hours from me as I was triaging tickets\making calls before 8AM. I felt more motivated as a result of the trust given by our manager & not wishing to be seen abusing the perk.
After lockdown they had the finance manager that stuck in a ticket asking IT to call one of his staff as they weren't answering his emails, not on the corp IM system & to find out what the problem was, the IT Director no doubt getting flack & stress from now having to cope with the ticket surge & reduced staff on-site to provision hardware at one location rather than two, saw the ticket & rang the manager to give a much more expletive laden informative phone call saying.
"It's not my overworked & stressed staff's job to do your job of ensuring your staff understand the concept of actually WFH, your employee logged on to the VPN at 8.02am this morning & logged off at 8.18, having created the illusion of presence has clearly decided to f**k off for the rest of Friday on a long weekend"
*Ironically 50% of the team had been under notice for 3 months, myself & the other remainer, left 2 weeks before lockdown & laughed as the tickets surged for WFH support issues & provisioning new kit.
**Despite always saying we should take our laptops home between ourselves, we very rarely did.
We’ve had several new starters since we’ve been WFH almost 100%. They’re all doing just great, including the trainee in his first IT job. When we do go into the office we end up sitting in different parts of the building due to constraints on space that were put in long before the pandemic - the office space can only accommodate 50% of the staff at any one time. If you want me back in the office, give me a dedicated desk and chair that no one else uses so I don’t spend the first half hour getting comfortable.
I’m tired of this ‘get back to the office’ rhetoric. We’re done with that. The local cafe and shops by where I live now gets my business instead of the ones by where I work, so don’t pull that line on me.
From a company that benefitted everyone during the lockdowns, which showed that landlords and hedge fund managers need to not have so expensive, fully populated buildings.
My company is doing similar but it is 2-3 days if you can. There aren't enough desks or parking if everyone comes into the office.
In a document dispatched to affected workers, some of whom are not happy with the change of direction, BT Group CEO Philip Jansen talks of the new "smart working approach: 3 together, 2 wherever.""We believe in being together," the boss says in the missive being distributed to many in the workforce today. "That means most of our office-based colleagues coming together for at least three days a week in the workplace, or with customers.
This is good news if you hate hotdesking - in order for everyone to be in the office together he is clearly committing to one desk per employee. Otherwise how else could this work?
It's good to talk!
Unfortunately using one of those phone thingys you speak into isn't all that effective, and the internet service we provide isn't really good enough either, so go and meet up with people face to face instead. Much better than the shit we sell!
Sounds like he got worried by some accountant showing him some figures about how much they were spending on empty office space, and he forgot what service his company is selling.
I'm guessing BT doesn't use it's own services...
https://www.businessdirect.bt.com/technology-articles/homeworking/
"Coronavirus led to a huge rise in the number of employees working from home. And, where possible, this is set to become the new ‘norm’. "
Hypocrites.
"I'm guessing BT doesn't use it's own services..."
Up until a couple of years ago the building was using a Meridian remote unit (don't know how many years its been since they became Avaya) fed by ISDN30 (20thC tech) back to a main site. Where people still needed a physical phone they were replaced by Cisco ip-phones... which have just gone end-of-life because the call manager package that drove them is no longer supported by Cisco
I am absolutely torn by this one. As an oldster who spent my entire life in an office, with all the unproductive distractions, I have really enjoyed working from home the last two years and just getting things done. But having recently changed jobs and working the 3/2 schedule, I'm around a team of less experienced guys and can speak to the benefit of overhearing conversations about troubleshooting an issue, new designs, etc. that were just so wackadoo that the experienced me had to say something to get the juniors back on track. If I was full-time WFH I wouldn't hear those conversations and the team wouldn't benefit from my experience, so score one for being in the office. I also feel some payback is due for the mentoring I was lucky enough to receive when I started my career. Still, working from home was great, so color me conflicted.
Well, I spent years in the office and years working from home, and the main difference I notice is the remote channels limit "workplace conversation" to actual workplace-relevant content. The other water-cooler babbling -- gossip that would embarrass a clique of adolescent "mean girls", sports-pool bets, and the like -- I can do without.
Wife is a partner in an international firm. Since WFH, she says the connections with newer team members is less, and as such, loyalty is less. They're getting a much higher turnover of staff than they used to - pay has increased above inflation, environment is still good to work in, but lack of loyalty which is gained by being connected to the firm in the workplace is less, making people more susceptible to recruiters, even though this firm offers great development pathways.
Good and bad from both sides I guess, personally I love working from home, I put in a few more hours using the commute time to get work done in the mornings when it's quiet, nd my company has saved a ton of money by sub-letting floor space, reducing head counts as everyone is quite happy to work a little more and the cost of kit is dirt cheap, (laptop, screens, chair and sundries ). We can come and go as we like to the hotdesks in the office, try to go in once a week but often slightly less, my company encourages working from home but they ask us to just put in a smidge more effort to earn and enjoy it, I'm good with that as it seems fair compromise.
> "Working remotely, we've lost that deep connection we only get from being together – with each other or with our customers – more often."
Instead of harping on about WFH, why don't you "get together" in my mid-sized town and give us a "deep connection" providing remotely modern broadband speeds?
The slogan, "3 together, 2 wherever," is like something dreamed up by the CCP. It's actually creepy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-24923993
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3137393/communist-party-jargon-tigers-and-flies-chinese-dream-10?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article&campaign=3137393
Why do these types feel the need to impose such things. The whole debate about remote working seems to be seen in far too binary a manner. Speaking personally coming to the office once a month or so is what I want (and seem to have at present). Others, I know will far prefer to be clocking into an office most days. Why not allow for all scenarios?
...the news will be... BT has announced record losses as they continue to be unable to keep up with technology advances and consumer demands. This news follows the ongoing mass exodus of talent from BT after their CEO ordered all employees back into the office last year.
(Sorry dude, the modern workplace is remote; you can't put the genie back into the bottle.)
Basically the BT CEO is admitting that BT in fact suck at communications and they need everyone back in the offices as it takes the strain off their crappy network because they've not bothered investing. City fibre have done in a few short years what BT have never been willing to deliver.
"At the heart of this is our very good reason for being: we connect for good. It's in our bones, and it's what we do, every day. Working remotely, we've lost that deep connection we only get from being together – with each other or with our customers – more often."
For fucks sake, make a proper business case that backs up what you say with some form of evidence or fuck off.
He does seem to have forgotten that he still has an awful lot of staff(*) for which WFH isn't an option...
(* obviously that excludes all the jobs that have already been outsourced to companies capable of laying a cable to your house then tarmacking over it to finish the job)
This - with the costs of running a household and now attempting to force people back into the office - no doubt increasing costs with commuting this will result in yet more pain for us poor plebs.
My employer is getting ready to mandate this 3 days in 2 days wfh bollocks.
Nope - I had a contract where the new CEO decided that contractors, and only contractors, could no longer work flex, and had to take a big cut.
Some teams lost decades of cumulative experience, and others lost all their developers. Didn't make any difference.
Still, the contract was via Adecco, who proved just how truly useless they are.
A CEO that has already shown his disconnect from staff telling everyone they need to spend even more money and time traveling to a site that is either out of date or badly designed with poor seating, noise protection and a canteen that overcharges on every product they sell. A good amount of these sites are not in walking distance of any shops on typically two 30min breaks.
Statistically most agents are hitting target or above, a target that was raised during WFH. They are already withdrawing WFH from the minority that underachieve.
It was a terrible move bringing in the EE hierarchy, to replace the old BT one yet the board allow them to keep on going even with a diminished share price and what looks like a preplan of dividing the business into sellable chunks.
The soon to be removal of BT in households seems to be a topic that's hit the news but not discussed? It's hard to understand the direction..
That my last two & current job I've been a maximum of a 21 minute commute.
I'm underused most of the day & could happily work from home, but I'm the walk up to IT Guy at the facility in the event of a user issue & the guy that gets screamed at to fix the computers in one of the engine (Icon) test cells when things go horribly wrong.
I am a contractor for a number of businesses that include a testing lab where I have to support critical testing equipment. I do almost all of my work remotely and I have done for nearly a decade.
If you are seen as a "walk up" support solution, then the problem is cultural, it has nothing to do with what is required for your work.
If the kit you support fails regularly enough to keep you nailed on site, you need to step up and sort that out because that level of instability is unacceptable. If this is the case you must cost your employer a fortune in downtime.
Wouldn’t a convenient way to achieve that be to encourage a % to leave and not replace them thus reducing heads without any redundancy costs?
Convenient but unwise, the best will leave first, the dross will remain as they won't be able to find something else.
"Convenient but unwise, the best will leave first, the dross will remain as they won't be able to find something else."
Ahhh but that would assume that in a giant corporation senior management don't think that any resource is the same as any other resource.
Except them of course, they are unqiue f***ing geniuses without whom the world would end.
I suspect the biggest cost saving could be made by either offshoring the C level or replacing them with this:
https://easydecisionmaker.com/
A detail missing here is that there has also been a cull of office space so in some cases there is no longer enough space if everyone comes in for 3 days. Apparently it's then okay to sit on sofas, or in cafes or canteens. How does that help connect with colleagues if you're nowhere near them ! I'd suggest filling in DSE form everytime someone is for forced to work somewhere inappropriate. I doubt my back would survive some of those suggestions.
Do you work in IT?
I can't remember the last time I had a comfy desk/chair on a client site. I've propped up my laptop on everything I think...fire extinguishers, rack shelves, pot plants, window ledges, draining boards in company kitchens, the edge of someones desk, water coolers...you name it.
The most comfortable thing I've sat on is a pile of old servers with a load of old folded cardboard on top. Worst thing I've sat on is an ice cold steel datacentre floor.
Shit, in my younger years, I even slept in freezing comms rooms and on several reception couches.
If I'm lucky, I can sit in my car outside the datacentre with the heaters on.
Doesn't matter how big the building is, IT always gets a raw deal. There usually isn't any human furniture where the important kit is.
Being an "IT guy" isn't like having a regular desk job...it's the private sector equivalent of being a marine.
Freezing your balls off in the urban wilderness (or boiling you balls off depending on the aisle you're in), trying to survive while you fix a fucked disk array or rebuild a massive cluster...by yourself with nothing but a crap company issue laptop...living off the LAN by stealing cables from other peoples racks. Hunting down and fighting with vending machines. All while trying to avoid the guy at the front desk who wants to "go home in 15 minutes because is missus is pissed off". Taking heavy UPS units out of a rack by yourself because nobody told you that you'd need two people and the batteries are swollen so you can't get them out.
This is why I think Bear Grylls is a wimp. Because the first thing he does is start a fire...the first thing we do is put them out and we're not allowed to start them. He also spends the entire time trying to get back to civilisation, while we're trying to grab as many hours as we can to stay in a shit hole to get the job done.
Techies don't need comfort...we just need fucking idiots to stop opening dodgy emails.
before we're all forced to work over 48hrs now hitler Truss is getting rid of worker rights. She wants us to work more like China and as I bang on about over and over China use slave labour so appears that's what Truss wants. I get more done working from home than having to deal with walk ups coming to my desk "While you're hear I just have this issue".
Log a fucking ticket!
I work for a company who were great during the worst of the pandemic and then chose to implement ‘back to the office x days a week’ as things calmed down.
I wanted total wfh but alas that’s not to be.
Thing is, I’m autistic and wfh is my heaven - personal space, low noise, no colleague BO, or bs chatter for me to try and avoid with noise cancelling headphones etc.
Reasonable adjustments, you’re having a laugh!
When the tech is available we should use it, productivity is not measured by how many days people get to see my ugly mug.
Anonymous because, well I’m sure some of my colleagues frequent these halls.
It always strikes me that the workers disrupted their homes, spent money and made their working methods WORK for WFH in order to keep the company going. Continuing to WFH is the quid-pro-quo.
Otherwise why would you ever agree to WFH if its not possible to get into the office due to snow etc, or a site disaster, or being on call? You've been told you can't effectively WFH any more after all.
I think the problem they are likely trying to avoid is laying off tons of middle management. With WFH a lot of middle managers have less work to do and are in a precarious position. The CEO might not know this yet and the middle managers are in a stronger position than lowly plebs when it comes to getting information in front of the CEO. It's way easier for middle managers to argue that their job is harder with their staff WFH than it is for plebs to point out that they don't need middle managers.
My company also persists in this 'back to the office' nonsense, insisting we are more productive face-to-face with our colleagues. Actually, I indeed was, however even pre-covid most of the jobs in my area then got pushed to India and now post-covid all of them except mine are. So I really don't see much point in commuting to the office to be interrupted by a small number of people there on any given day, who have no connection whatsoever to the job I do. Just let me work from home, until I can't afford my energy bills any more, then I'll come into the office, assuming I can still afford the commute. Or feel free to pay me off and I'll be gone.
Pre pandemic the BT management sacked thousands of people to cut costs. They avoided redundancy payments to further cut costs. They avoided redundancy by offering employees jobs at the opposite end of the country in the certain knowledge they would decline to accept and so leave without any redundancy payments.
Part of this scam was a policy that stated you must live within one hour travel time from your appointed office.
Then the pandemic came and all BT "knowledge workers" had no choice but to work from home. Guess what, their productivity went up!
Now imagine if the same BT management declared that these same knowledge workers could continue to work from home.
All the thousands of employee's who left because they were told they had to work from an office would be putting in claims of constructive dismissal.
It would cost BT millions.
Will BT management admit publicly that is the reason they are trying and failing to force employees to work from an office?
BT is also asking staff to keep a tighter control of business expenses, as is happening any other companies including Microsoft and Google, in anticipation of a more challenging business environment.
By doing this, companies are generating/aggravating the crisis they anticipate by removing money from the economy. It's short term view (typical from a company led by public shareholders) and it's shooting themselves in the foot.
== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==
Completely tone deaf from BT here. It's an absolute gift to competitors and a proper own-goal. I foresee a few things:
1.#EpicFail on productivity: I expect this edict has been an immediate and widespread distraction to most people working at BT, so an impact on productivity today. It seems quite biased towards stick not carrot, so someone rightfully called out the fact that you've now got thousands of employees with some built-up goodwill that will be reducing at pace. Imagine how hard they now want to work for you - any upside such as getting most of what-would-otherwise-be commute time, will be pretty much gone in the coming weeks, perpetuating the productivity impact.
2. Common sense bypass and carbon footprint: this notion of together is flawed in any case: someone in Bristol but working with colleagues across the UK isn't "together" by spending time and money, and contributing to what-will-surely-be a massively inflated BT carbon footprint, to collaborate over a teams call from a plush office you've made the error of building. Oh dear! Collaboration needs to be meaningful and face-face is great but that's more in the 'carrot' category, not based on 'go to this specific office' direction.
3. Costly brain drain: some people will simply feel it's the proverbial 'straw that that broke the camel's back' after a widely-reported poor pay award to most (not Mr Jansen) and leave or certainly is now nudged to consider that - more talent flying elsewhere, probably to a competitor than does eat its own dogfood when it talks about hybrid working, 'the future is now' or digital workplace solutions. With leavers comes impacts on teams that become overstretched, and a bill of something like 15-20% of salary to back-fill roles, never mind the distraction and 'lag' in doing so.
4. Driving the wrong behavior and costs: if you have a team with three or four people in BT, across multiple areas of the UK, today they might jump on a call and then come together for workshops and other meaningful collaborations face-face occasionally. The temptation now will be to have more face-face meetings, to tick the '3 together' box, driving more business costs. I'd wager no additional budget has been planned for, and many companies are seeking to reduce travel costs in the second-half of their financial years. Maybe BT only believes in collaboration if they don't have to fund it, or only if you work with colleagues in the same building. Careful what you wish for.
I was waiting for the dominoes to start falling. I had a sense in my own work environment that management reluctantly accepted this accommodation of working at home during the pandemic, mostly because of the safety and freedom they personally received, all the while bristling at the loss of direct control. I suspect no one wanted to be among the first to speak against that flexibility, but eventually mouths started shooting off and we heard Elon Musk's ultimatum and now this CEO of BT.
The thing I find most astounding is that BT is in the business of telecom, which I regard as being about connecting people and things effectively regardless of the physical distance between them. To me this is a bit like a dairy company saying, "We don't allow our employees to drink milk. It's bad for them."
Philip, try to live your own company's mission. Perhaps recognize the shortcomings in your own world view that make it difficult to imagine people being effective while physically apart, and create and then offer a product or service that will fix that. Microsoft Teams is not the solution, and Zoom is not the end-all either. I know almost everyone adopted these because they were there, but those are like band-aids. We can do better, my fellow technologists. Someone will solve this and make a killing, which I think might please some shareholders.
Because I like pointing out a company's own mission, values, and vision which I feel they are ignoring:
1. BT says they to want to be all about Innovation.
2. "Setting the benchmark of excellence and continuous improvement as a national leader in ICT...", which last time I checked meant Information and Communications Technology. They listed it first.
And also, from https://www.bt.com/about/bt/our-company/our-purpose-and-values:
"We believe there are no limits to what people can achieve when they connect. And we know that we are in a position of responsibility: what we do, how we do it, and the technology we develop helps us bring people together and build those connections." Do you know that, BT? Really? Does your CEO?
Or, don't. I have so little use for CEOs who somehow got to this position of power, and yet seem incapable of doing something good with it for at least their people, if not the greater world around them.
Well, it is a wonderful time to vote with your feet, BT employees. My wish for you is to find a company that values you.
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