IBM Consulting is done playing around, orders immediate return to office

IBM Consulting this week told its US-based executives and people managers that, effective immediately, they must work from a corporate office at least three days per week, or face the consequences. John Granger, SVP of IBM Consulting, told staff in an email this is a company-wide policy that extends beyond the Consulting …

[RJX]

Blah, blah, blah. Amazon tried the same thing and had to modify their policy to tell people they may not get promoted. How old generation is that thinking, even forgetting that IBM is a corporate dinosaur?

To all of the execs and managers talking about working effectively and collaboration being the reason, how many office locations do you have? Because every time an employee in one office works with an employee in another office it's the same as working remotely. That has not hurt companies a bit.

[elsergiovolador]

Green washing

Just look https://www.ibm.com/uk-en/consulting/sustainability

So pathetic.

Do they at least buy carbon credits for each employee's commute?

Oh and let's not mention crowding the roads and public transport to make journeys more difficult for workers who actually need to commute.

Let's face it. They are using employees to artificially keep value of commercial property up.

But I wonder if they will share capital gains with employees...

[sabroni]

Re: But I wonder if they will share capital gains with employees...

No you don't because you know they won't.

[An_Old_Dog]

Thou Shalt Not Question the Rules

Mr. Geen, employee of IBM Consulting, asks his boss, Mr. Black, to explain the logic of this new policy.

Mr. Black says nothing, but writes down in his little notebook, "Mr. Green is not a team player, and is a prime candidate for an RA. Mr. Green could easily be replaced by his younger counterpart, Mr. White."

[IanRS]

As a consultant (but not working for IBM) I have always been under the impression that your primary task is to provide services to the client. On that basis I have worked where the client wanted me - sometimes their offices, sometimes WFH. Strangely, no client has said that I would work better from my consultancy office.

[Roland6]

As a consultant…

IBM Consulting must have an interesting business model… its office overheads must be significant…

My experience of the SI’s and consultancies is that they tend to minimised their office footprint, so having a hundreds based at an office with only sufficient space for a few dozen desks.

[Dimmer]

In a previous life

IT staff was excited about the new policy of management paying for phones and allowing remote access. They asked why I was not and I replied “ being salary you are going to always be on unpaid call.”

Now, I work from home. I work at the office. I work at clients locations. I work while I am driving my car.

Access to work is easer now that we have tech that supports it. I don’t believe in wasting my guys time. If they don’t need to be in the office, work from home. If you have too many distractions there, come to the office. Regardless, document your hours so you get paid for them and I can make sure you are not burning out.

[keithpeter]

Re: In a previous life

"[...] and I can make sure you are not burning out"

Well done that manager

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual IBM has no idea

Now the company wants us to travel to the office, but:

1. No office space.

2. No meeting rooms - all booked by exec's so you can't have effective meetings

3. And to cap it all, you are working on engagements that have millions of value and they say F2F is essential, but won't permit travel for essential meetings about client engagements.

IBM execs live in a fantasy world and have no idea about how appalling they behave and IBM management are ineffective and process and policies are rigid and not joined up.

Arvind just stood and told us to move at pace. Perhaps he needs to go and see how useless the release processes are and see how we spend more time on the IBM release process than we do solutioning for the client and meeting the client.

The removal of experienced staff means that we have "architects" leading solutioning without the ability, with no idea how to understand an end to end solution, then the execs wonder why we lost the deal (the client saw the bag of broken biscuits) or we win and have a troubled project on day 1!

It will be better by putting us back in the office, when we work in useless environments and are working with people scattered around the globe

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: As usual IBM has no idea

Ahh.

The IBM I once knew and hated. Interesting to see things have not changed one iota....

[Starscape]

Re: As usual IBM has no idea

Sounds 100% right. Glad to be out of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know an employee who started working from home in 2009. All employees doing such back then were ordered back into the office and to spend at least three days at the client site. Everyone obliged but the person who worked from home since 2009. They never came down on the person who IBM moved to Kyndryl 2yrs ago. This person still worked from home and was passed up for their boss's job. Said person went to the DEI manager who told the person they should've made it known they wanted the job. The person claimed they didn't know about it and now wants to sue for racism because they replaced the manager with two white males. Headshaker.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgot to add, and then they fucked my dog.

Nobshaker.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Aristocrats!

[Big_C]

I thing it is OK

There are several reasons why working in the office has benefits. From my experience a 3 to 2 home office days is a good mix of having time for complex tasks with fever interruptions and with flexibility to manage so off work tasks during the day.

In the office you/co-workers help onboarding new staff and initiate working in teams on complex tasks.

Being on site has a lower barrier to ask someone for input/help and discussions are more direct.

And some meetings are needed and useful. :)

[elsergiovolador]

Re: I thing it is OK

Being on site has a lower barrier to ask someone for input/help and discussions are more direct.

Synchronous communication is a massive drag on productivity and sometimes is dangerous. When engineer works on something critical and gets interrupted by someone who didn't bother to Google their problem and since it is face to face, engineer can't ignore it until he finishes their work stream (even simple "I am sorry I am busy can't help you right now" can derail the train of thought). These interruptions lead to bugs and other issues that take more time to resolve and co-workers learn to be dependent on others rather than being autonomous.

In the office you/co-workers help onboarding new staff and initiate working in teams on complex tasks.

This is a problem of bad documentation and lack of or poor onboarding materials and tools and insisting on face to face onboarding gives no incentive to improve that.

[Roland6]

Re: I thing it is OK

>” Synchronous communication is a massive drag on productivity”

Something a consultant feels greatly, the normal hours being needed for meetings, fact finding etc. with the clients staff and other team members. “Hotel time” is when you least likely to be interrupted and so can progress the project ie. Do the value add bit, so the following morning you can have further meetings etc. …

[darklord]

Re: I thing it is OK

As long as the desk your using has the facilities you need, commonly you lucky if you get anything more than a desk and chair, no monitor, keyboard, extended displays or even a single display monitor. many people (like me) moved there ahole desk IT equipment to home and have the original set up to enable me to do my job at home. i go into the office, all i can do is work on a laptop screen and keyboard. and speak small talk around the office with colleagues i havent seen in a while yet speak to daily on teams.

I don't have the amount of sick days i used to working in the office because im not seeing the die hards who think its ok to bring colds and flue into the workplace rather than stay at home with the kids all day.

[CountCadaver]

Re: I thing it is OK

And just like in school they get plaudits for never being off sick but all the while destroying productivity by making everyone else ill and putting anyone with health conditions / living with someone with health conditions at risk

Ableism and presenteeism 101

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: I thing it is OK

"Being on site has a lower barrier to ask someone for input/help and discussions are more direct."

Maybe I didn't understand what you were getting at but I'd understand "in office", at least in this context, as being at the employer's office but "on site" as at client site. In this context "on site" may be essential depending on the nature of the project. "In office", however, adds nothing positive and very likely plenty that's negative if the work can be done from the worker's choice of location.

[TonyJ]

Re: I thing it is OK

Rubbish.

I've worked from home for years now - either fully remote or partially. Probably close to 10 years.

Generally I am dealing with colleagues in wildly disparate locations - my current team of 6 are spread all around the UK and Europe.

We have a robust onboarding process that includes assigning a buddy to any new member, as well as I am available when needed. It works well.

On the current programme, it's large, convoluted complex. The customer is pan-European and is making moves into APAC. Again, we've never struggled to communicate, or to initiate new tasks.

This isn't about anything other than "I need to see the size of / micromanage / show I am good manager of my empire". And it's bollocks. I went into the office a few weeks before xmas because of some requirement for F2F. That was a 100+ mile drive in each direction to spend literally 7 minutes in a meeting room to talk about something that we could easily have done over Teams. I didn't even need to log in or find a spare desk.

This, like so many of the other big companies insisting on it is, in my personal opinion (mis)guided by two things over and above my comment earlier: The need to utilise the expensive property portfolio and a way to target people for the next round of layoffs...because the dinosaurs don't realise they're doing more harm than good to their business.

[Necrohamster]

Re: I thing it is OK

Boomers tend to prefer the office because they can wander around all day doing nothing, while giving the appearance of working. Or wasting other people's time waffling on in meetings. Once that generation's retired, we'll see less resistance to WFH....

I'm not paid to onboard new staff...that's HR's job.

Nothing about working on complex tasks is more difficult in Zoom or Teams. I prefer online meetings because you can say "hard stop" after an hour to avoid having your time wasted.

The real reason managers want people in the office is that their "management" effort is harder to measure (or "appreciate") when their teams are WFH

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I thing it is OK

How many boomers are even left in workforce and what makes you think they would prefer to work an office? What other pearls of wisdom do you have to share with us?

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: I thing it is OK

In the office, it's easy to ask the same stupid question endlessly as there's no paper trail, thus no incentive for them to retain anything. When they have to ask on a messaging application, now they're being recorded so they have a choice to take notes and retain, or get the convos sent to their boss asking why this person is employed. And yes, it breaks that train of thought I had on MY problem to tell the dumbass sitting behind me for the thousandth time that if you does this and it does that, what does it mean? IT MEANS THE SAME THING IT MEANT THE LAST HUNDRED TIMES YOU ASKED!

[darklord]

And wait for Sick days to rise

Yep Covid is rife in the UK again at the moment (as we knew it would) and especially in the office. So no chance im heading anywhere near that breeding ground of disease thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: And wait for Sick days to rise

I had COVID for two weeks, probably picked it up from relatives while visiting them over Christmas. Since I work from home, I was well enough to be productive while still testing positive. So a decent work from home policy could actually benefit employers, whereas an insistence on office working would have put me out of action.

[Anonymous Coward]

Been remote working for years

I have been regularly working from home since the late 1990s as I have been working for companies that implemented RDS/Citrix solutions and we ate our own dogfood. I would probably do at least 1 or 2 days at home every fortnight. Sometimes being in the office was better, other times I needed flexibility or just didn't fancy the commute. We also had remote staff in different parts of the UK and a dev team in Pakistan (don't ask!) at one company I worked for. When I finally upped sticks and moved to Australia, I continued working for my UK employer for over a year.

At my current employer we are based in the NT, but have remote staff in VIC, NSW & QLD, plus one staff member who is currently back with family in Greece.

[TonyJ]

Re: Been remote working for years

I have said it before on here. I am back in a position where I am leading a team after many years where I didn't particularly want to.

My requirements: The work gets done - to a good standard and on time. I don't care where you do said work, or to a large extent, when it gets done, but my rules are always the same:

1 - You are available for necessary* calls

2 - I want to know if there is a problem before I get flak from the customer/stakeholders

3 - Do not take the piss. You won't get a second chance to that.

*By some definition of "necessary" - I think we all share the pain of unnecessary time on Teams calls.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM ...

IBM -- I've Been Married

[spold]

Re: IBM ...

Incredibly Borked Management

[CountCadaver]

Re: IBM ...

It's Bullshit Mate

[elsergiovolador]

Re: IBM ...

During WWII it was Indexing Bodies Movement.

[Basmman63]

Re: IBM ...

I've Been Misled

I've Been Moved

I've Been Micromanaged

etc.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Same message

We got the same message here. Company is supposed to be all zero carbon etc but apparently telling 60k people to start commuting again doesn't count.

We were also told that not being in the office would affect promotion and bonuses. But since I don't want promotion here (lots more work for very little renumeration), and the bonus is now so small that it wouldn't cover the commuting costs; I shant being going in unless there is actually a purpose.

I don't particularly object to going into the office occasionally, but I object to being forced to only to have the same video calls I would have at home since most of the people I have to talk to are not in my nearest office.

I do understand I'm in a fortunate position to call their bluff on this but many aren't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Managers enforcing back-to-office policy...

...implicitly admit that they themselves are much less productive when working from home and assume the same applies to all employees.

As a techy, I haven't set foot in the office more than 10 times over the past 4 years. Yet I work well over the contractual 40 hours, managing my little personal datacentre, and have made immense progresses in a multitude of domains (cloud, AI, devops and cybersec).

Yet my manager, ex IBM, coincidentally, shares her working hours between her kids' school, the park nearby, and bugging the maid at home. She sends 10 emails in the morning and 10 in the evening. She makes basic powerpoint templates and excel trackers. She even delegates setting up meeting arrangements. She travels abroad but doesn't go beyond shaking hands with customers and publishing those pictures on linkedin. She has no technical understanding whatsoever and you already know 90% of what she writes in her emails. She's the laughing stock of her team and most of her entourage.

Yet her own manager can't live without her. That's how the magic works:

10:

Incompetent captains rely on incompetent lieutenants who's sole ability is to order rowers to row. Lieutenants report progress to captains who report progress to generals and everyone keep their job. That is, until customers experience procurement and marketing BS fatigue. Then quarterly results nosedive, profit warnings are published, and stocks plummet. But there is a magic remedy: rowers are let go (because, guess what, rowers are the only ones who don't have a say about who should leave the boat). Thankfully, stock prices return to normal, and shareholders can't sack the CEO. GOTO 10

[fredesmite2]

What's the purpose of going to an office

if no one communicates with you ?

you sit by yourself and call in to meetings

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What's the purpose of going to an office

I have a long-term health condition that means I'm vulnerable to bad outcomes if I pick up an infection. Because of this, I'm allowed to work from home wherever possible, but there are times when I have to go in to the office. But this is never for face-to-face meetings, it's to do things that I can't do remotely, either because of physical access or security policy. When I'm there, they allocate me a desk in a corner of the office remote from my colleagues, and I wear a face mask, so it's not actually like I'm there!

But I have one project manager who seems to have decided on one personal goal, to try to invent as many reasons for me to go into the office as he can. It's a real pain in the neck (actually just behind the ears - the face masks chafe). Sometimes, he just wants a body to do something, not even requiring my skill set.

The one problem he has is that there are now so few people in the project because of cost-cutting (basically we're down to one SME per deployed technology) that they want us all to cover for each other, even though they don't want to provide either formal or cross-training for other people's skills sets.

I sometimes think I'm being a real drain on the project, but even though I've said that for the sake of the project they should, they either can't or don't want to find someone to replace me! Oh, the joy of having a needed legacy skill that nobody else wants to provide. I guess I could just leave, but I don't know what I would do, or how I would earn a crust!

[Adam Trickett]

WFH is good for a lot of IT work.

Been WFH for just over 6 years now 100%, after working strictly from the office before that for more than 20 years, I found the transaction interesting, but now I've done it I couldn't imagine going back. Our firm is basically WFH now, unless the client wants on site. Our office became an albatross during COVID and we're never going back in.

It doesn't work for everyone and every job, but for me writing code, I like being at home, even if I've basically swapped my commute time for unpaid work. My team is scattered around the globe, so it's not as if we're in the same physical office anyway if we were on site!

IBM are idiots if they want everyone back in the office...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get out while you can

Anyone over 40 is going to be laid off as per policy.

Even those the come back to the office full time, are going to find their jobs offshored before long anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Get out while you can

The funny thing is that IBM in particular have had a habit of bringing some of their most useful ex-employees back in as contractors, because they've gone so far that they no longer have anybody directly employed with the required skills on their own platforms. They put a request for certain skills on their internal assignment boards, but get nobody applying, and then go out to contract.

There was a phase where they actually started training graduates in mainframe technologies some years back, just to try to stop this, but the entire training now goes to "Hybrid Cloud" and "AI".

So I can see this use of contractors continuing, even when they have a stated policy of trying to reduce the number of contractors they use. Eventually, they will run out of ex-employees prepared to work. Let's hope they've retired these legacy platforms before then.