Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday On Monday Dell is expected to send a "Return To Office" notification to all employees, a source familiar with the matter has told The Register. Dell last year implemented a more limited version of this policy, directing those living within an hour's commute of a nearby office to work from there at least three days per week. In …
"no way of tracking employees coming and going because they are not locations where Dell badges work"
Not that this is commentary on the rightness of the policy but I hope this particular employee isn't tempted to not come in, based on this idea. I don't have inside information on Dell's corporate network but I expect there's at least rudimentary logging of where connections are being made from and when.
In my experience, enforcement of this sort of policy, even if the policy is company wide, tends to vary from department to department.
I work in a large company, where the support is divided in to teams. One of the teams, the manager insists on no talking in the office unless it is discussing company problems, and preferably with a user. Other teams are a little more relaxed, in that we can have a bit of a laugh. Note that the company does not have a policy in place forbidding technicians from talking about things apart from work.
I've no doubt Dell does have staff who tell on other staff like that. I've seen it in other companies, and they aren't always paid to do so.
I do suspect, however, the Dell tracks whether each user is logging on from a Dell office or not though. Even through systems like Microsoft Office 365, they probably have access to IP logs.
So back to the office you drones
Ken the manager can now sit on your shoulder telling you you are not working hard enough
He can share his latest holiday or new car stories with you wether you wanted them or not
Dell employees start looking around they are not your friends or co workers
These people think they are your masters
The only power they have is what YOU give them
Good luck
"It will be the best people that they lose."
That is only partially true. Have you stopped and considered some of the best people may actually like being in the office. Also considering many businesses are also doing the return to office and others are doing layoffs there may be less "best" people leaving.
In underpaid government contracting I called this "survival of the least fit." Anyone who could get a better job, did, leaving only those who were unemployable elsewhere. Management's fix was to threaten to black ball people from underpaid jobs if they disnt take them, which seems about as intelligent as RTO.
That isn't necessarily true...because for every decent person Dell loses, there are several decent people looking to jump ship from elsewhere...tech recruitment is essentially just a massive deck shuffle...sometimes you get a bad hand, sometimes you get a good hand...that's just how it goes. Whether or not you get a bad hand depends on the company goals for a given financial year.
Everything is relatively short term in tech...there is no such thing as long term planning because things change incredibly quickly...the genius you hired now for current targets might be awesome for your current projects, but absolute dross for the next one...he may end up being a hindrance...
The only universal constant in tech hiring is that average techies with average talent and no opinions tend to do as they are told, highly talented, highly skilled, highly opinionated techies typically don't...in some circumstances, the bread and butter stuff, it is possible to get more done with less talent and thus less cost...simply because there is less friction.
In my experience over 25 years, the best people for a job are not usually the most knowledgeable, the best people are the ones that get shit done. Most of the exceptional techies I've worked with have been a massive pain in the arse for various different reasons...we've all met them...the hallmarks are:
1. Extremely opinionated on tech choices.
2. Extremely unflexible with their choices.
3. Over focusing on the "best" choices rather than the "optimal" choices.
etc etc
> so a win for the shareholders I guess
Exactly...over the short term. It's a classic "eating your seed corn" strategy. Of course it'll backfire in the long run, but at that point, the responsible parties expect to be long gone, running some other organization into the ground.
Absolutely this.
My old employer decided we needed to come in 3 days a week.
This gave me the oomph to accept a job from one of our suppliers.
A job that is fully remote and paid the same.
I now live by the seaside and don't commute to London anymore, except for 1 day a year - the company piss up. I mean, important annual meeting.
I work better remote. Many of us do.
New companies accept this. Indeed, the older bigger companies who insist on silliness like this will definitely not benefit from it.
Fun fact: Dell used to be like this. It's only since last year they flipped their position on WFH. As late as 2022 they were basically cheering about how they had been early adopters of the remote worker thing and COVID reinforced it was the right choice.
Something weird happened last year.
and ya canna blame 'em there
Nor can you blame the cities. If they've offered tax breaks for companies to occupy an office block, and so keep the local shops and cafés in business, it's hard to fault them if the offices lie empty and the cafés close for lack of lunchtime customers.
The free market isn't necessarily the best thing for society.
The fact is that some people who physically go to work will spend money in the area where they work. This helps ensure jobs in that area (maybe just a little).. The people in those jobs will have money to spend in their own local areas, which helps other businesses and so on.
This is related to why I believe any tax breaks the government gives should be given to the poor, not the wealthy. Because the poor won't just shove whatever they get back into off shore accounts. They are more likely to spend it in local businesses, and therefore improve the economy..
If all the businesses in question are local businesses owned by locals who employ locals on a decent wage you absolutely have a point. But you rarely get local businesses in cities where most of these offices are employing local people for a decent wage. You also don't get ANY businesses other than large out of town subermarkets near the business estates they also frequent. Instead it's some massive international chain employing out of town staff for minimum wage where almost every penny of the money doesn't just go out of the area but as you say it literally goes out of the country.
I can't find the stat now so you'll have to excuse me if I misremember it. If you go to a local business where the owners live and work in the area and employ locals it's typical for 90%+ of the money stay within the community. When it's a Tesco or Starbucks or Costa, the figure is nearer 90% leaving the country.
The main reasons rich people want poor people in the office are because they want to retain control over us, they want to justify their sunk costs in buildings and they want us to prop up failing business models. They couldn't care less about local businesses, if any exist, or us. Countless studies have shown that WFH policies increase productivity in every single situation. There is no justifyable business reason for a return to the office other than the illusion of control. I've been WFH for 9 years and I can't imagine ever going back into an office now. I did it for 20 years and I hated every single minute of it. The fatigue, the monotiny, the inflexibility. It was just horrible.
I'd rather ensure that money goes to local business where I live. A lot of offices are in office parks where EVERYONE has to commute, even the Barista!
No excuse MD, you saw an op to save tax and get rid of staff knowing full well this will hit the bottom line for a period.
"[The Republicans] didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. [But Hoover] didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands."
- Will Rogers
OTOH two can play that game. Find a city where the lease is nearly up or at a break point. Walk away, closing the office completely. No taxes being paid, not even broken ones. No footfall for shops and cafes. Make sure other cities know what happened.
Is it just the US where this tax-break thing happens?
I don't know if it happens in other countries, but the US is full of cities tripping over each other in the race to the bottom that is tax breaks to big corporations.
Eventually it goes as far as businesses not only not collecting taxes from major corps, but actually paying them to be there. And local businesses and residents have to pay what the big corps don't.
>Is it just the US where this tax-break thing happens?
Councils in the UK have been known to offer incentives to bring business into an area and keep it there. One of the reasons you get the larger IT companies with presences in locations not necessarily associated with highly-skilled employees. One of the other big reasons is that these places usually tend to have lower wages than the bigger cities.
And national governments do too - like Ireland with Apple, etc.
> it's hard to fault them if the offices lie empty and the cafés close for lack of lunchtime customers.
Prior to Covid the coffee shop in my village struggled. After Covid we now have two coffee shops and people who are more engaged with the local community…
Not necessarily, especially not if you remember that "London" is more than just the bits where most of the offices are concentrated. WFH might be bad for those central London retailers heavily reliant on footfall from office workers, but it was every bit as beneficial for those local retailers in each of the towns and villages that make up the wider Greater London area, as it was for retailers in commuter towns/villages outside of London.
Joke's on them. When I worked downtown I drove on their streets, parked in their parking lots without paying and I didn't eat from their restaurants. I didn't even buy fuel for the car there! I caused wear and tear and they got nothing! Nothing!!! ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡BWA-HAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!!!
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Same here it's cheaper and likely healthier to make your own sandwiches at home and no way in hell would I ever pay the ridiculous price coffee shops charge! Every office I've worked in has had perfectly adequate tea and coffee making facilities and they cost nothing.
Bring your own granules in then. Or your own Cafetiere. Is the difference really worth four or five quid every time you want a cup of coffee?
Someone willing to pay £10 a day for coffee could save a lot of money making it themselves. Approximately £200 a month in fact.
no way in hell would I ever pay the ridiculous price coffee shops charge!
November 2021 I bought a bean-to-cup machine.. looked at the stats 'tother day - just over 4600 shots of coffee dispensed since then.. Sure, I've had to buy beans, provide milk and the electric to power it but, working on £5 for a cup of coffee in a shop, even when the £700 cost of the machine is factored in, I've saved a *lot* of money. And made the coffee how *I* wanted it, not how some indifferently-trained barista thought it should be made. It's arguable that I probably wouldn't have made or drunk that amount of coffee without the machine though.
And I know how often my machine is cleaned..
(I even maintained it - the steam unit developed a crack so that, every time milk got frothed or the milk contained got cleaned (the milk goes into a container and is auto-frothed to whichever degree I choose) it would pee over the work surface. I resisted the urge to buy a NEW SHINY (my wife was watching me like a hawk) and just paid £45 for the part then £5 for the 'security' bits required to undo the screws holding everything together.. Works fine now, even though the case is only held on by two screws instead of four..)
> When I worked downtown
I got a job downtown because someone told me that when you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry seems to help.
But it turns out that's not much good when you're stuck in an office and trying to work. All that "music" of the traffic in the city is just annoying.
The lights are much brighter there? Yeah, I just need some bog-standard LED lighting to see what I'm doing, I could do without the godawful neon signs glaring through the window.
"Things'll be great", my arse.
Which is insane. Do they want to help the tax base by handing out tax dollars? That's inane. Or Do they want to help small businesses by handing out tax dollars to large businesses? That's also inane. They need to take a step back and consider trying a new approach, like using their brain and acting rationally.
《Name one ?》
Any that have had an ex fenestra experience with the BOFH. Lesson: Fifth floor defenestration is very rarely non-lethal and then only if you land in a pile of rockinghorse shit.
Am I the only one that can see this ending very badly for these large corporations? Having a large proportion of disaffected employees creates a pretty toxic culture which will impact on all aspects of the business with the customer facing activities taking the biggest hit exacerbated by so many of these enterprises replacing those roles with AI/LLM.
Anyone walking away from Dell's insensitive dictatorial cruelty might consider farm work or midwifery. No, wait. I don't think they have WFH packages either, so maybe not. Very silly of them. No wonder they have staff shortages. Clearly farmers didn't give much thought to that when planting crops so far away from residential areas. In the countryside! No 5G either. What idiots! And surely pregnant women should come to you as a midwife. Active travel with extra weight will improve the exercise they are getting.
Serious question, are you aiming for a large number of downvotes ?
Of course there are jobs that can never be performed from home. There are many jobs that don't require to be in an office, and after spending more than a decade working from home myself, the company certainly benefited, as did i.
Of course it is not an inalienable right, but then, there is a futility in forcing people into an office which is noisy, cramped, with all the other negatives such as travelling time, costs, and food costs - work output quantity and quality can definitely suffer working in an office.
Do you know how ethics work? Doing what is right? Bait and switch? Imagine 15 years ago you are offered two similar opportunities. One is for Dell and one is for XYZ company. Dell offers a remote option with a stipend for internet and office equipment. You work and are productive for 15 years, get several promotions and are rated highly in performance reviews consistently. You travel as required for conference and onsite needs. You establish yourself in your community, buy a home, enroll kids in schools and wife gets a job (not remote) in town. Life is good. Then pandemic hits. Dell says this is new normal for all employees and is able to quickly transition more workers to fully remote including those from before. It is going very well, record revenues and profits (but not record profit sharing). The CEO chides other CEOs saying if you are returning to office you are doing it wrong and that after COVID they expect 60% of the workforce to be remote.
Then they say hey if you are within 1 hr we are moving to hybrid. Since you are further than one hour doesn't apply to you. Also, they eliminated the nearest office during COVID.
No one shows up to the office that used to before and remotes stay remote.
Then they ask again.
Now they are mandating it and include all the remote employees into the same policy and telling them they are going to be punished for raise/bonus/rsu and org hygiene exercises. That is a broken promise on many levels.
The good employees who are remote will return to the office.. just not the Dell office.
>Do you know how ethics work? Doing what is right? Bait and switch? Imagine 15 years ago you are offered two similar opportunities.
Not just 15 years ago. In 2020 and 2021 plenty of larger organization took advantage of the WFH trend to recruit the best people from all over their country. Now they are telling these employees that were employed 100% remote that they can only progress if they return to an office they've never worked from - and wouldn't have ever considered working from.
We actually and actively do plan for exactly that. We will sit in stairwells[1] etc. and then take a sick day, because of inadequate work place conditions and the back ache we now have. We still have about enough office space for everybody, but... Yeah, contingency planning from our side.
We currently have 60/40 (office/home office), though that's not that... strictly enforced. We currently discuss 20/80, which is about what I would like, as long as I get the rest of my team coming in on the same day, say, once a month, it's good to see them and chat... (but that's my opinion).
[1] bonus points for tripping a "manager" who voted for return to office,and selling of buildings, and making life very miserable....
Of course the irony is that older workers with most to lose in this dictat are the ones with the least interest in career advancement.
Most of them have achieved their career goals, and have come to the conclusion that life quality is a more important metric than some meaningless job title
This feels like a policy invented by a 30 year old hr exec trying to climb the corporate ladder who has no understanding of value over cost
Too wrecked to commute, can't stand traffic, but I can work from home.
Did say if I drove to the office, I would get in after 10 and leave around 15 to avoid traffic and dark.
If it was demanded, I would go on sick and look for work in an out of date language WFH only, no stuff it, just retire.
Ok, so maybe not a ruse, but certainly a decision that has other potential benefits ...
If you want to "thin" your workforce in a fairly painless way, both reputationally and cost effectively, it does seem to be a useful way to go about doing it.
I'm sure this "thinning" of the workforce doesn't cut a workforce in the same manner as layoffs, but it's certainly less brutal.
Quite how this impacts talent in your organisation and holding onto it, is probably hard to measure.
It seems that those not interested in career progression are likely to be older workers - people in their 50's and 60's.
They should have an incredibly useful depth of knowledge to draw upon, so just let them work remotely and don't rock that boat.
Those willing to go into the office are clearly going to leap ahead of their peers - it's a no-brainer. No need to explain further.
Those unwilling will either go in begrudgingly or hand in notice.
Congratulations, corporate entity, you have weeded out completely unscientifically, a small portion of your workforce, with hardly any effort.
You just have to hope you haven't lost some of your best workers - and you have to hope losing people doesn't start a donimo effect with the rest of your workforce!
That's a VERY real problem that many of us have seen or been involved with.
-------
As a complete aside, this does open up another area of investigation when researching a new position.
Investigate the office space of companies you get offered interviews at.
If they've recently downsized office space, but still kept the same amount of employees, chances are they are into proper hybrid working for the long term.
The reverse may also apply ;)
> You just have to hope you haven't lost some of your best workers - and you have to hope losing people doesn't start a donimo effect with the rest of your workforce!
Remember that the people in charge usually do things like this for the short-term cutting of costs, increase in profit and consequent increase in whatever form of bonus they receive for that.
They plan to have moved on to the next company by the time the long-term consequences of their short-termism become obvious.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
"... in France to encourage those with ten or more years of service to leave the IT goliath."
Translation, we don't care much for quality of work or the experience required to drive that quality. We'll hire the greenest, most inexperienced cheepo, straight outta uni kids and still charge the customer as though we're offering *actual* service.
To all my comrades working for such horrid taskmasters, I urge you to move away from them.
Yeah, we've had this one a fair number of times where I work, and HR have had it explained in painstaking detail as well.
Specifically, engineering jobs attract people who are good at engineering. Quite a few of these are either actually autistic or have a lot of autistic traits, chiefly those of not actually liking people very much and certainly not being very good at dealing with them. So, taking oldish, experienced engineers and trying to turn such individuals into managers is basically the psychological equivalent of square peg, round hole.
It doesn't work and when engineers are forced to try to become managers then you get really crap managers and also lose good engineers.
This sort of thing is why I opted in the end for an interview with a private psychiatrist to work out once and for all if I was autistic; I am and have NHS-accepted proof thereof.
Which is why, whenever this question is asked of me, my response will be clear and honest regarding just how utterly uninterested I am in assuming any sort of managerial role, how keeping me as a hands-on engineer is not only what motivates me to do the job but is also what will get the best out of me for the company, and that I'm perfectly aware of how limiting this means my future career progression will be, but so be it. I know what I'm good at, I know what I'm not good at, so let me get on with the former and save the latter for someone who likes that sort of thing.
Same here, autistic - diagnosed mid forties.
I actually aspired to run a department once, and being great at what I did I soon was given the job.
A big pay rise, and more important for me at the time, 37 people under me and a £1million pound annual budget.
It soon became apparent to me that my skill set was not people!
After a couple of months I switched my 'internal targets' to training up the best of my deputies and having her succeed me when I resigned.
She did great. Honestly, they should have given her the job in the first place to be honest.
Thing is, since that day I have done much better.
I now earn more, work from home, and given my setup cuts out the things I deal with less well (People, Commuting) I thrive.
When I last worked from office for Big Corp I practically never talked to solution architects, developers or customer facing execs outside my corner. Covid caused some sort of revolution. Nowadays I chat daily to these guys - all via video meetings or chats apps, all WFH and of course with a new more enlightened employer.
We've just had a "Back to the office" diktat issued, but not for the reasons given in the article.
Ours is likely temporary, and is due to Corporate's reliance on Ivanti's VPN software that we were all reading about here on el reg a week or so back.
Here's an offer you can't refuse. If Dell are getting uppity with YOU for wanting flexibility; then come join an employer that values that flexibility instead.
Trust me, there are plenty of us that do.
The only good thing to come out of the lurgy has been the proof that presenteeism is a complete fallacy. You don't need to be in a suit and tie chained to a bloody desk to do your job, and in fact, you probably do it a whole lot better without.
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I work from home.
I like working from home.
But I completely understand the idea that employers want people back at the desk. I know people who work REALLY WELL from home, who treat it as a privilege earned. Before the WFH era, I had a coworker who got special permission to move out of state and work 100% remote -- but he was one of the easiest people on his team to contact, and if there was an issue, he was AVAILABLE. I know a lot more people who like to chant how much better they work from home, yet have no idea what is going on in the company, can't be reached when needed, and are generally considered mostly useless by their peers. But there are just a lot of things that work better in person. Many of the better improvements I've made at employers started out with conversations overheard, or discussions with non-team members at lunch or chats at cubes or water coolers. e-communications works great when there is a plan, but it sucks for spontaneous cross-team solutions to problems people didn't know were solvable.
Career limiting?? I haven't had a job where there was a clear career-long advancement plan in...well, ever (ok, there was one that had a long history of internal advancement, but by the time I was there, they were contracting, not growing, which makes advancement difficult). Usual way to advance one's career in the tech world (and in much of the world these days) is to quit and go elsewhere. But for those that stay, it makes perfect sense to me that people who know their coworkers well and are recognized by their superiors will advance more than those that don't. I started a new job a year and a half ago, nothing I'm not familiar with, but working on-site with my boss the first several months helped a LOT at learning the ins-and-outs of the new company, and also got my face in front of other people that are important in the company, to the point that many will come to me for an issue rather than my far more time-with-company peers, and I survived a reduction in staffing that a more senior peer did not. I've also been forced to become 100% remote due to building consolidation, and that has limited my ability to do projects that I would like to do.
WFH makes training new employees difficult. It can work for people expert in their craft who hire in to do exactly what they already do, but hiring and building up green people to become future experts...that's really hard to do remotely (I've done it. I think it worked out better than everyone expected...but not as well as I feel it could have). I don't think many people are praising the results of "remote schooling", and I don't think it will work any better for on-the-job training.
And probably worth remembering: if you can work from anywhere, you can also be replaced by someone from anywhere. It certainly reduces your negotiating power when you can be replaced by someone with a much lower cost of living.
As I said...I like working from home. But there are downsides. And employers are not wrong to see those downsides.
Start your downvotes!
The three things Michael Dell just lost from every single employee. I would be worried about malicious retaliation.
As a 20+ year employee who has just had the carpet of years of great work pulled from under me. Oh I will tick all the boxes MD but don't expect any productivity, quite the opposite
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