Meta to use work badge and Status Tool to snoop on staff

Tough times loom for Meta engineers and the wider workforce that refuse to return to the office for at least three days a week following a warning from HR of the potential career-ending consequences of non-compliance. Just like Google, Amazon, and others, the parent of Facebook is starting to police the return to office more …

[abend0c4]

As our technology improves

You'd think, given the vast quantity of money they've thrown at the metaverse to get the technology to its current hopeless state, they could well afford marginal inefficiencies in the meatverse that is presently responsible for their entire revenue.

[Zolko]

Re: As our technology improves

We had used Skype in 2008 : it could do 15 years ago everything that "modern" video services can do today (chat, video-call,shared screen ...) and an ALL platforms. Then Micro$oft bought it and it died (well, at least for me). Which means that "technology" in this field hasn't improved over the past 15 years. At all. So "technology" probably won't improve much

[hammarbtyp]

Re: As our technology improves

What do you mean hasn't improved. I mean did you have a app 15 years ago, that could not be killed and continually nagged you to restart it like Skype for Business does. If that's not progress, I am not sure what is

[Anonymous Coward]

Tough on people hired remote

I know someone in the UK who was hired into a remote role in Meta during the pandemic. Last month they had their workplace switched to the London office (they live in Cardiff) and were told to attend the office 3 days a week. They pointed out that the train takes 2.5 hours each way and the ticket costs most of a days pay, but apparently there are no exceptions. They haded their notice in and were told to come to work 3 days a week for the notice period, until they pointed out that the period required to change his contract to have him based in London is the same as his resignation notice.

This seems like one of those US based mandates that hasn't taken regional legal variances into account.

[Roland6]

Re: Tough on people hired remote

Sounds like they need to talk to an employment law solicitor, potential case of constructive dismissal.

Even if the solicitor errors on caution, getting the solicitor to write to HR is normally sufficient for an improved “no fault” severance payment, especially if your friend is disabled…

[MachDiamond]

Re: Tough on people hired remote

"Even if the solicitor errors on caution, getting the solicitor to write to HR is normally sufficient for an improved “no fault” severance payment, especially if your friend is disabled…"

By insisting on a change in location that leads to a 5 hour daily commute that's unpaid in time or costs could also be considered a sacking in practice and subject to severance since it wouldn't be for cause. I'd want to stay away from any employment contract that states they can move the place of employment on short notice and consider not making the move the employee quitting their position. If the person took the job with the understanding that it was a remote position, the company should be on the hook to compensate the employee for the change in terms if they don't wish to accept the changes.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Tough on people hired remote

By insisting on a change in location that leads to a 5 hour daily commute that's unpaid in time or costs

It's been called "freeway therapy" and has been used as an unofficial way of punishing a worker who has displeased management.

[DS999]

Or those who moved

There are people who lived in the hyper expensive Silicon Valley area who took advantage of companies saying that they expect remote work to become the new normal and moved across the country where real estate is cheaper, to be near family, or whatever.

You're kind of screwed if suddenly work expects you to show up three days a week and you're living in Iowa.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Or those who moved

"You're kind of screwed if suddenly work expects you to show up three days a week and you're living in Iowa."

Need to check the small print. Did FB specify a particular office? Or even specify it must be a FB office? Get a lawyer to check that mandate! :-)

[MachDiamond]

Re: Tough on people hired remote

"This seems like one of those US based mandates that hasn't taken regional legal variances into account."

This is why it's important to have competent local managers.

When I had a bunch of employees, I used a payroll service. The cost of one screw-up on my part in fines would pay for the service for 18 months. The other advantage was that the government had stopped auditing those payroll services as their team tended to know more about the regulations than the government drones doing the audits. The same thing applies to employment law. The cost of competent local staff is far cheaper than the legal costs of running afoul or one reg or another.

[Groo The Wanderer]

Re: Tough on people hired remote

What this is is nothing more than the "dictator mentality" a lot of upper management has. They never allow for being told to piss off by departing employees that were hired under completely different terms. Contracts are bidirectional though, and a job is just a contract between employees and their employer.

[aerogems]

What I'd Like To See

Instead of Zuckerberg spending all his time training to be a MMA fighter, to show up and work in a cube or at a desk like any other entry-level hire. None of the perks that come with being a CEO, like company car and driver, private entrance, palatial office, everyone coming to you for meetings, an assistant to help juggle your schedule, etc. Facebook tends to pay a fair bit better than average, so I won't hit him as hard about trying to live off the salary of the lowest paid employee salary, but I'd still like to see him try to do that. And support his wife and child on that salary.

I bet he wouldn't be able to make it a month.

Once did some seasonal work at a big box retailer, and the one nice thing I will say about the store manager is that during the month or two I was there, I swear I saw him doing just about every single job in the store. I saw him working the checkout lanes, working the customer service/returns desk, pulling inventory from the back. Not like the store manager for a fast food place I worked at as a teen where she just sat on her ass in the office the whole time, or would maybe be the person who would assemble orders for the drive through. She never assigned herself any of the shit jobs like cleaning the lobby and restrooms.

[MachDiamond]

Re: What I'd Like To See

"Not like the store manager for a fast food place I worked at as a teen where she just sat on her ass in the office the whole time, "

That manager could have been a lazy so and so, but they could have also been so loaded down with required reports, scheduling issues and a bunch of make work that she honestly didn't have time to do anything else. I'd lean towards your assessment, but I've seen the what I describe often enough. Some regional manager comes through and finds the store manager wandering around and doing things like pulling stock from the back and decides they'd rather see them do something more managery instead. The trouble is that wandering around observing things can be a good way to manage.

[EricB123]

Re: What I'd Like To See

Well, Zuck could give every employee their own private jet.

[Anonymous Coward]

"after 18 months those with glowing appraisals can apply to be fully remote"

Would be interesting (and more valid) if the person doing the appraisal had no knowledge of how often the employee was in the office.

[that one in the corner]

But at least, if you can stick out those 18 months, the rewards will be worth it:

> Goler said that after 18 months those with glowing appraisals can apply to be fully remote, and will only be able to come into an office four days out of every two months.[1]

"Sorry, love to attend your meeting, but I'm only allowed in four days and I already had to miss a fifth colleague's birthday (I hear that cake was delicious)."

[1] that may turn out to not be an exact quote from Goler, but no court in land would disbelieve anything published by The Register, so you're safe.

[Antron Argaiv]

If HR thinks people work better when in the office 3 days a week, what happens at the 18 month mark? Do they somehow do better when NOT in the office? Or were they doing just fine remote and this is all a charade (or a managerial dick waving contest)?

Not that I would ever consider working for Zuck, but this seems to be more the HR mandate-of-the-month, than anything to do with efficiency or productivity (not that Facebook requires any of that in the first place)

[M.V. Lipvig]

It's a trap. "Your performance improved over the last 18 months with 3 days in the office, so now we are requiring full time office work with no work from home."

[heyrick]

Might I suggest

That while enforcing this "must be in the office" crap, you also evaluate people's productivity.

You see, while management sees working from home as ample opportunities to slack off, I'd bet quite a few of the non-managers would see it as a place to be able to fully concentrate without the endless "you must attend this pointless meeting that has sod all to do with you but I'm calling this meeting because I can", not to mention the backstabbing narcissists that interfere with anything that they perceive as a threat to their career progression.

Fuck all of that.

[aerogems]

Re: Might I suggest

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Might I suggest

A friend "works from home" 3 days a week. Except she likes going to the office, so she's actually in the office most days.

Still what Outlook doesn't know, it can't schedule you for...

[MachDiamond]

Re: Might I suggest

"Except she likes going to the office, so she's actually in the office most days."

For some people, that is a good option. If there are others in the household and no good place to seal yourself off, the office might be the only place you can get your work done. I worked at a place where the office manager's kids would call every 5 minutes with the classic "he's hitting me" sort of nonsense. It was a bit frustrating that she didn't shut that sort of thing down. In an odd bit of logic, it may have been better if she were working at home and could give the little whiners a daily knuckle duster to keep them inline. That was decades ago and there wasn't the tech for her to do her job remotely. I remember that we were using a DEC PDP11/73 for operations and a couple of PC AT's for engineering stuff. Ah, the memories.

[Roland6]

Re: Might I suggest

The era before the microvax…

In ‘85 I had a megastream (£300 pcm for 1mbps !!) terminated in my garage and a microvax in the home office.

As I worked for a small company, it meant my house also served as an off-site work hub…

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: Might I suggest

I fin dit fascinating that the companies cited in TFA are all software companies. How a software professional is "more productive" when in the office vs at home, is a mystery to me. I can easily see why some jobs are in-office, but software development would seem to me to be about as far towards the "WFH" end of the scale as one could get.

[Groo The Wanderer]

Meta also prevents Canadians from sharing news stories from ANYWHERE in the world and commenting on them, not just the Canadian sites that they're having a pissing match with the Canadian Federal Government over. I was already tired of the constant bot censorship, but with this, the whole point of "social media" is lost - to share your thoughts and comments on topics of interest - and I, for one, am done with the tech bros egos and being caught in the cross-fire of their greed. Just collecting email addresses from the few friends I only contact there, and making sure my others are up to date. Who needs "social media" of any kind other than LinkedIn? :)

[Groo The Wanderer]

And the Reg of course! Couldn't live without my BOFH! :D

[EricB123]

LinkedIn?

LinkedIn?

[Groo The Wanderer]

Re: LinkedIn?

I'm a contractor; job hunting is part and parcel.

[Anonymous Coward]

HR of the potential career-ending consequences

Getting fired from Meta means an end to your career?

You can't just disappear into the crowd of 10,000 faceless ex-Meta employees when asked what your last job was?

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Pessimist me

This sounds like a half-baked loophole for mass layoffs without having to give 60 days notice or pay into California's unemployment funds. Make a list of people who aren't in the office enough, give them repeated warnings, and now you have a huge list of employees ready to be 'fired' if there's a recession. I doubt California is going to fall for the trick. Employment is already 'at will' and I don't see mass firings as an exemption to the rules.

The last few years feel a lot like just before the 2001 bubble. There's a lot of effort put into maintaining stock prices and cutting costs but little thought about the maintaining business or keeping customers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Working for the Borg

Sounds like hell on earth.

Cage fights aside.

[Bebu]

A Different (Under)world, a Different Language?

《 be expected to come in or partake in in-person work for the three days.》

Not sure what this peculiar clause's intended meaning is. Is in-person work a recent HR neologism? The way I read it these poor sods can show up and nod off for three days *or* join some meeting jollies with similarly afflected souls for those three days. Myself, I would only be up for for the extended siesta.

HR missives always seem to be strewn with nonsensical hapax legomena among the general litter of banal bollocks and corporate codswallop.

This sort of nonsense always reminds me of Pratchett's wizards' reference to HR in candidates that were of no use to them viz those "who think thank you is one word and can look at a sign sayin' Human Resources Department without detecting a whiff of brimstone." (A Collegiate Casting Out.)

I also imagine the Golgafrinchans had an "early access" ark for their HR creatures and the like, which tragically detonated when launched.

[M.V. Lipvig]

"Just this week, a survey indicated that 80 percent of executives actually regret mandating a return to the office, and Atlassian said last month these initiatives destroy staff morale and slow innovation."

This is the amswer. If you like WFH and are forced back to the office, in-office performance needs to crater. So, the days you work from home you do a good job, the days you work from the office you... don't. When asked, cite workplace distractions as interfering with the job, and point out that these diatractions do not exist at home and do not affect your performance. We need a concerted effort to break employers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, call me stupid, but....

... why not simply check how the employee is doing in their employee review? If they are doing brilliantly, then no need to change anything.

If they are slipping on anything that could be blamed on working from home, suggest ways to fix it, and if that doesn't work, then make coming in to the office a requirement.

That gets you the best productivity, and the least staff-piss-off.

But I'm just a humble techie, not a management weasel, so what would I know?

[Tron]

GAFA is run by lawyers and suits now.

Everything they do now to roll out corporate control will just see the quality leave. There are better places to work. GAFA don't innovate any more. They buy innovation in. Get a better job and leave them to rot.

[RyokuMas]

No surprises...

"... engineers who joined prior to the pandemic and worked in the classic office setup were performing better than remote workers..."

... because these workers are used to interacting: in an office environment you can have the ad-hoc conversation in the kitchen that leads to a new approach or a problem being solved, you can see if the person you need is free to talk (does anyone actually pay any attention to those status indicators of messaging apps?) or if someone want to talk to you, you can guage if the new joiner is struggling with their setup or a team member needs a hand...

Of course, there were always the few who would just sit there with their headphones on, ignoring everyone, trying to pretend that the rest of the world did not exist and acting like interacting with other team/department members were an unneccesary distraction - the "not a team player" types, probably the same ones who are making the "if I'm forced back into the office, I'm leaving" noises now.

Individuals may be as or more productive at home than when in the office. But teams as a whole? It's debatable. I personally have seen days lost because someone "was productive" for the entire time but did not realise that they were working from out-of-date information or an incorrect approach, resulting in work having to be re-done.

Managers - as much as thse of us at the coal face like to moan about them - have the over-arching view; they can see that while individuals are being productive, teams are often not performing as well as they did pre-covid due to this lack of ad-hoc communication. So it's natural they want us back in the office (although I would not be at all surprised if some of them had other motives). And it's likely that companies that do get people back in the office, even only for a couple of days per week, will start to accelerate: not only will their teams' communication have returned to full capacity, but the refuseniks who would rather stay at home and not interact with their team on anything but a scheduled basis will have left.

And should this come to pass, the companies still trying to run fully remotely will most likely see that they are being out-competed and possibly be force to adopt the same policy.

I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell, but I'd wager that in another 5-10 years time, we will all be back in the office at least once per week.

[Groo The Wanderer]

Re: No surprises...

The only thing that ever happened to me working in an office is that lazy co-workers would bug ME instead of using a search. My response would be to slowly turn around, search, and send them the top 3 links in an email.

But my work and my train of thought was toast for 30-45 minutes of ZERO productivity.

[Joseba4242]

Re: No surprises...

This!

To all of those downvoters: What better way is there for newcomers to learn than to sit with different people, look over the shoulders and get ad-hoc explanations?

I've seen it time and time again that the all-time-at-home people are "productive" at what they are doing, but not able to change quickly and flexibly and discover new ways.

[FreeTard]

It is such a cheap way of workforce reduction. Nice one Zuck you complete dick

[hammarbtyp]

The office

Soooo many questions..

Firstly what sort of metrics do you use to show someone performs better in work than at home? Since everyone has an infinite variable set of circumstances, I can't think of an easy way to measure it.

For example if you a women with 3 kids, are you more productive being dragged into the office to do a job you are quite capable of doing just as well at home?

There are however other metrics that can be measured such as the number of sick days taken. These are rarely mentioned in these arguments, but the fact it is easier to work from home when feeling slightly ropey and you are not a walking virus cloud in the office would suggest that sickness leave would be reduced. Then there is productivity. People working from home will start earlier and work later because they don't have the daily commute, never mind they can integrate there life around work rather than sneaking off because their kids are sick and all holiday has been used.

Yes the argument about creating connections is an important one, but not everyone is the same. People of a certain generation are quite happy with virtual links, and can adapt well (You would of thought a social media site would understand this)

However the main thing we find with hybrid working rules is how unevenly the rules are applied. Workers are told to get back into the office, while managers will always find an excuse to work from home (important call, etc)

At the end of day, the problem is not productivity it is the sight of empty expensive real estate that is the primary driver. Only time will fix that

[RyokuMas]

Re: The office

"People working from home will start earlier and work later..."

If you want to work more hours for the same pay, go right ahead! :P

[Darrenking]

Bad news for anyone who would ever consider working there in a million years.