Dell staff not alone in being squeezed to reduce remote work If some of you think management started to tighten the screws on return to office this year then you aren't alone – three in five workers say they are feeling the squeeze too. Some 60 percent of 2,000 workers across the UK agreed with the statement: "In the past few months, my employer has become stricter about making sure …
My pay is shit for what I do but I'm only staying as its a small IT team and I get to be home most of the time. When I go in the office I'm mainly going in cause I want to not because I'm forced to. The only reason this is happening is because there are lots of low level managers that are incapable of managing from home. They need to micromanage and can't when at home so know people will discover they aren't required.
This is coming from the top.
Investors, shareholders are worrying about their commercial property investments are going to lose value if the workers are not coming in.
They tell the board and then it trickles down to "low level" managers, some of whom like the idea (what's the point of being a shepherd if you can't see your sheep!), they get the blame and board gets level of plausible deniability what drives this.
I'm no fan of these moronic mandated office working edicts, but I don't reckon many people will resign. A very few may move jobs, but with herd thinking by large organisations they'll be lucky to find somewhere that's genuinely focused on results over presenteeism.
Agreed. Making noise on the Internet is easy, finding a new job is very much less easy. On top of that, you'll need to find a new job in your skillset at a company that is not mandating RTO and, apparently, those are getting fewer by the week.
The ultimate irony, of course, would be actually finding a new job with WFH, resigning, and being told RTO a few months later . . .
With the shortfall in employment in most STEM sectors, tbh, if you have a reasonable CV you can definitely find something. Flexibility being on offer is a big draw to prospective recruits.
We have a lot of vacancies ourselves; so many in fact, that we do not advertise them all at once because the pool of people that consider applying is small enough that we are competing mostly with ourselves if we do so.
Whether you can find something else without moving house is a different question, though for a flexible business where presenteeism isn't on the agenda...
Our department boss lives in Glasgow; line manager in Rotherham, and myself in the Midlands. It isn't a problem.
Believe you me, good jobs and employers are out there. If you can't stand your current outfit, take a look around. What's the worst that can happen?
"What's the worst that can happen?"
You get a new job only to find that a few weeks in that it's worse than the last one.. Better the devil you know.... The grass is always greener etc..
Unless your job/commute is an absolute nightmare think twice before making any rash decisions; your house/sanity might depend on it.
"Our department boss lives in Glasgow; line manager in Rotherham, and myself in the Midlands. It isn't a problem."
You are preaching to the converted here. We know this works, many of our line managers (and their managers, and their managers) know it works, and appreciate the flexibility and saved time themselves. However, a few influential hard-of-thinking morons like Musk and Bezos have set the trend, we have clueless politicians implementing the same rules eg for UK government employees, and before you know it we'll be back to the same shitty treadmill of office based presenteeism, and pollution and congestion from commuting. Productivity won't improve, CEOs will eventually get this, but they won't admit they were wrong, so presenteeism will be the norm.
Hard of thinking morons? Two people who have single handedly changed the way retail, automotive and space industries work?
And Larry Ellison? And Zuckerberg? As for those dimwits at Google, IBM, SalesForce, most Investment Banks, Zoom.
Yes, what do they know.
I’m sure you’re a highly successful business owner and absolutely not an employee.
"Hard of thinking morons? Two people who have single handedly changed the way retail, automotive and space industries work?"
Amazon built a business by selling at near zero margins, bankrolled by investors who'd never heard of mail order before, they're now a dominant and bullying incumbent with a 50% market share. Bezos got lucky because he was there as the internet gained mass penetration, and he was able to use IT better than the many extant mail order firms. Now, shutting down much of the retail sector, becoming a regulations-dodging souk for dangerous Chinese tat might be your idea of genius, it isn't mine.
Musk was rich beyond his wildest dreams by sheer chance at Paypal, and then bought his way into Tesla. He hasn't single handedly changed a fucking thing, with series of self inflicted harms, regulatory and legal battles, and Tesla's products are shoddily built, with crap support. On the other hand, he certainly has single handedly changed things over a Xitter - I'm assuming you rate that as a success?
"Zuckerberg"
I need say no more.
"And Larry Ellison? As for those dimwits at Google, IBM, SalesForce, most Investment Banks, Zoom."
Well, you make my point so nicely. The companies that make and sell collaboration software and enterprise tools are by enforcing RtO admitting that either their own products don't work adequately other than in battery human farms, or that it works perfectly well but they're so dismally managed that they can't make it work themselves.
But you're the defender of their management genius, perhaps you can tell us?
"Our department boss lives in Glasgow; line manager in Rotherham, and myself in the Midlands. It isn't a problem.
I'm wondering if this could become a C21 trend of new local traditional skills.
Instead of Glasgow being shipbuilding, Newcastle being coal and Liverpool being about boy bands - we could have a modern equivalent.
All dept managers will live in Glasgow, all sales managers Leeds, all IT in Whitby and all HR in Basingstoke
I work from home 4 days per week normally, and $EMPLOYER is perfectly OK with that.
There are 2 offices I can go to; one is fairly local (about 35 minute drive) but that is not the team I primarily work with. The one thing of value in that office is the cross-site engineering meeting where we all get together in the offices (which connect over teams). I find that particular meeting quite valuable because I am one of the design team and the local office is an integration team so we get a bit of a chat going.
The office where the team I primarily work with is about 250 miles away and I go there when it is necessary (new hardware commissioning, troubleshooting and the like) which happens between 4 and 10 weeks apart (it really is dependent on what is going on).
When I do go there I go for a week (all expenses paid) so I am in the office that entire week - that all seems to work very well. Quite a few of the team I work with are quite inexperienced and mentoring them is easier with a teams chat than in an open plan office [1].
Some of the things I work on (apart from designing electronics) are making templates for the relatively new ECAD tool to automate the outputs; that demands peace and quiet so I can properly focus and try things out.
This is a relatively small company, so we get to be flexible, although that does mean wearing a number of hats but I am comfortable with that.
This works for everyone, so why change it?
Note 1. I am not going into the problems of open plan offices but I detest them with a passion as it can be impossible to concentrate.
I used to work for a Very Large University and when a bunch of my colleagues were given the option to work from home I asked if I could too. "Just fill in this form", they said. The last question was "What business impact would your working from home have on the university? " to which I replied, truthfully "I have been working from home for ten years and nobody has noticed. I therefore do not expect any significant business impact".
My request was approved. In fact over the two years before I filled in the form I had been into my office precisely five times. On one occasion I turned on my desktop computer to see if it still worked and there were so many Windows XP updates to install that it took four and a half hours to start up.
Training the new folks and/or getting them involved; overhearing office conversations etc. is one of the few downsides I think there is to WFH. I do like a proper pen and a whiteboard, or maybe one of those fancy 60" touchscreens to draw on for certain types of meeting.
If I need to sketch something to share over teams with a laptop and trackpad, this will take an awful lot longer. I had considered trying out a graphics tablet for this purpose.
For anyone established in role though, I do agree with your sentiments. The office is the exception and meeting space more than it is a place to plug in a laptop.
overhearing office conversations etc
I don't know. It's such a blessing to not hear that Sam's aunt is coming late or that Jim's child vomited on the carpet and they thought it was the dog or guys from marketing discussing heat pumps or Kat complaining the tube strike misaligned her chakras and someone nicked her crystal from the desk.
Who notices a printer when the office gourmawful decides hit the breakroom around 10:30AM for a little pre-lunch aiguiseur d'appétit of 3 day old microwaved leftover fried shrimp from Long John Silver's? You may have been hungry before, but now you question whether you'll ever eat again as you roll in the aisle, grasping your own throat, hoping to collapse your own windpipe to end the horrid torrid nightmare that was once life-giving air seeing as there is not a convenient cannister of mustard gas from which to inhale deeply from.
Who notices a printer when the office gourmawful decides hit the breakroom around 10:30AM for a little pre-lunch aiguiseur d'appétit of 3 day old microwaved leftover fried shrimp from Long John Silver's?
I can no longer tolerate the smell of maple syrup. And burnt popcorn should be a war crime, or at least terrorism deserving rendition.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, millennials and Generation Z workers had the strongest opinions about this.
As in very much all of the workers?
The elders though know it's pointless to argue with this and they just tap out into early retirement.
Why would anybody donate their time and transportation costs so that the rich commercial property owners don't lose on their investment?
The elders though know it's pointless to argue with this and they just tap out into early retirement.
This is me. Last year of the Boomers. (all of the blame, none of the benefits)
I have decided that when they decide RTO is more important than my contributions, I'll just live off of savings. Even though I get emails daily from recruiters, many of which are listed as fully remote. For me, going back into the office is >10% pay cut without accounting for the extra 2-3 hours a day commuting, etc. I'm starting to see this as time to finish off all the tasks that I want done before I retire, but never have time to do because work/life balance is screwed. A side benefit is selling off assets I really don't need extends the runway getting me to that formal retirement. The only wildcard (for Americans) is health insurance.
Most employers are demanding at least three days a week at home, it found.
I'm assuming that should be three days in the office?
I'm still working from home at a university, and recently senior management are starting to push for more staff in the office. However, they gave away 2/3 of our building, so there isn't room for the entire department to be back on site. If you're face to face with students I can get it, but I'm in a department that most of the staff aren't - and we'vbe managed working from home for the last 4 years without issues, so seems a bit drastic.
"so there isn't room for the entire department to be back on site"
Arrange for everyone to go in on the same time and hound senior manglement for more space: "I can't find a desk. Can I use your office for an hour or two?" "Bill say's he's having problems as well. Can he come and join us?". Then the killer, "I know it's hard for you with all of us in here. Why don't you work from home? we'll be OK here if you do."
Wah.
What a bunch of anti-social shut-ins we've all become.
Personally, I long to look people in the eye when I speak to them, know when I am about to interrupt someone, sense emotion before it comes out sideways (in myself and others), so on and so on.
And, my house is tiny and filled with the distractions, both pleasant and unpleasant, of my personal life.
WFH was fine when we thought we would murder someone by breathing near them, but you all can have it now.
Personally, I long to look people in the eye when I speak to them, know when I am about to interrupt someone, sense emotion before it comes out sideways (in myself and others), so on and so on.
I let people complete their sentences, even if they are completely in the wrong or make some outlandish claims. I don't interrupt. Instead I signal in the video conferencing app of choice that I want to speak next and wait for my turn while taking notes. This is much healthier environment. Many people, especially on the neurodivergent side may find being interrupted off putting and it's not an inclusive way to conduct meetings.
If one longs for looks in the eye, there is plenty of youtube videos where they can do just that.
And, my house is tiny and filled with the distractions, both pleasant and unpleasant, of my personal life.
Time to ask for pay rise. If you don't live in a sustainable environment, then donation of your commute time is not going to make your position any better. In fact you could use that time to find a better job.
YouTube videos to replace in-person contact... And ChatGPT in place of the flawed and oft misleading art of human conversation. What else you got?
@elsergiovolador, you write pretty but your rebuttal terrifies me.
I do appreciate the tip on "raise a hand and wait to be called on" in webcalls. Do you work for the Royal Family or something? Surely not anywhere in Northeast US. We don't play that.
>>And, my house is tiny and filled with the distractions, both pleasant and unpleasant, of my personal life.
It sucks to be you, I guess. But I don't see why others should suffer because of it.
My home office has big windows, natural light and a lovely view to the surrounding mountains... it is slightly better in my particular case than spending 8 hours under a fluorescent light looking at a blank wall
"It sucks to be you, I guess. But I don't see why others should suffer because of it."
Perhaps a little inflammatory, but so was the OP.
You evidently live somewhere nice. I live somewhere nice. Unfortunately that's not the case for everybody, and I've got colleagues who do prefer office work to home working. What I object to is pointless mandates as to where I am.
It's ironic that the UK government have mandated 60% office based for their employees, yet last year removed the data that allowed votes to see often MP's attended the House of Commons. The chief hypocrite in both of those actions was the Haunted Pencil*.
* JRM
Would be great if someone in the future looked if he had vested interest in this. Since many government buildings are leased, if there is no people coming in, the value dips and so that gives room to have leases renegotiated at the next possible term or terminated.
Given that blanket 60% attendance makes no sense and he has not presented (I am not aware) how he arrived at this figure, it seems like a desperate move to use civil service to prop up value of someone's investments.
It's interesting that no main stream media touched it from that angle. Seems like they are all in this together (the rich).
The elections can't come soon enough...
I do believe that most "real estate bros" are evil (we've got a rather notorious one here in the USA), I gave you a downvote because I don't believe that RTW, at a government level, is all just a rescue for that lot.
I do believe it's also about keeping people moving in an economy that expects motion.
That's an ex[expectation that needs to go. Huge cities as centres of employment dependent on long commutes are unsustainable dinosaurs. They need to be dealt with by converting some of the property to housing so those who want to live and work in a city can do so and, instead of building more homes on former business premises (AKA brownfield sites) in the surrounding areas, refurbish or rebuild those sites as business premises reachable without long commutes. It's not likely to happen without costs but, because of the unsustainably, given that it's a case of when, not if, those costs are going to have to be incurred sometime. It's arguable that it's the role of government to take the lead in that.
Yes, I keep hearing stories of sandwich/snack shops, bars and cafes struggling because of the lower footfall due to WFH. What I don't hear anything about is the likely uptick in grocery shopping or smaller local shops. pubs and cafes in the suburbs as they get used more by the people remaining in thoise suburbs during business hours. They money is still being spent, but in different ways and different places. Of course, some of that spend will be saved/banked, but in most cases will still be spent eventually. The economy is still going around, just not quite in the "traditional" way. And that seems to be upsetting some people. "Traditional" city centres have been declining for years now anyway, which is why there is so much re-development into residential in or close to the city centres nowadays.
While you are correct to point that out, he was commenting on how the economy currently works. Public transport is based on numbers of users and frequency of service. If the number of users goes down, then the operator will reduce the service level so that each bus, train, tram whatever is running as close to full capacity as possible, at least during prime commute time and that discourages more people from using it . More so if the service is a "for profit" operation. Where it's socialised, it might survive longer while local government can subsidise it. There's a shift happening, the incumbents and interested parties don't want to accept the changes.
Where I live, the public transport is over saturated and not reliable, so throwing people who don't need to commute is counter-productive.
It still seems daft to shift large population of workers from home to office just so that for profit public transport operators can make their money.
It's like another form of tax that essentially fills the pockets of the rich.
Not to mention creates pollution, wears down the infrastructure etc and we will all pay for it while someone else will enjoy their another yacht.
People should put as much resistance to this as they can.
Really. Consumers will either spend disposable income somewhere else, or they'll save it and improve their future buying power, or do some combination of the two. It's not like they're just throwing money away. I've yet to see any sort of methodologically-sound study showing a reduction in economic activity due to WFH. Yes, it's changed some aspects of spending; that doesn't mean it's reduced overall activity.
So, @A. Coatsworth:
No matter how terribly exclusive your enormous house in the pristine wilderness of the previous unaltered Earth may be, my point wasn't to start a dick measuing contest.
My point is that WFH entails a lot of encounters the artefacts (if not loved ones corporeal) of personal life. When I'm at stress about something work related, I don't like having that stress in my house and among the people I love. And the opposite is also just as true.
Yeah I don't think your point was not to start a pissing contest.
On the other hand it was berating the people who, like me, doesn't want or need to conmute to perform their duties.
If your conditions mean that you work better at the office, you should be free to do so. If my conditions mean I am more productive at home, I'd like to be able to WFH without being called an anti-social shut-in.
Horses for courses... in the end the problem is not the people who likes the office or the people who likes WFH, but these bullsh*t blanket mandates that benefit basically no-one and are being pushed for spurious or at least very hidden reasons.
To speak again of my particular case again, I'd like my employer to at least treat me like an adult and tell me the true reasons for RTO, instead of comig with half-baked kumbayah excuses for making me conmute for 2 hours to use Zoom all day anyway, because my coworkers are not even in the same continent as me.
I don't understand how in the age of climate crisis managers can decide if we have to commute and emit tons of exhaust gases as they just wish to monitor us closer
Let me explain: All that corporate bullshit about emissions and climate change, the sloganeering like "Plan A because there's no Plan B"? Well unfortunately big companies and public sector organisations really don't give a shit.
In the UK and Europe, companies and large organisations supposedly account employee commuting emissions as part of their Scope 3 emissions. But that's just window dressing, nobody other than climate change anoraks read the emissions bollocks that companies are obligated to collect and report, nobody cares. The collection of commuting data is flawed and inattentive, but again nobody cares. And even if Scope 3 emissions go up by say 15% overall, the bosses will either not notice, or just say "but that's Scope 3, doesn't mean anything".
Corporate AI use of power should likewise be included in Scope 3, probably won't be, but even if it is, again, nobody is going to care.
Sounds like you need to get the media to make a stink about it. Call your local green idiot group and tell them anonymously that your company is going to make everyone drive their big SUVs to work and most of you have a one hour commute. Might as well get something that is of some use from those fools.
Company closed 4 offices and half of mine during Covid. Relocated all the staff to the half of mine that was left so we have 500 or so assigned to 125 seats of which 25 or so are permanently pinched by admin, graduates and mid management types. Not IT support though, that's all over in Poland these days.
Now they say we are all expected to come in 2 days a week. so that's 1000 person days per week with a capacity of 500 person days.
I work for a UK government department that's got exactly the same problem. Government lease most of their buildings, the lease on our London department HQ ended*, there was no proper planning for a replacement, we ended up decanting a thousand plus staff onto the pavement, and then tried to cram them into a new office plus some overspill in other departments that collectively amounted to a fifth of the space we had before. Meanwhile, the morons of our current government have recently mandated "three days in the office or you'll all be sacked" essentially as a sop to Daily Mail readers.
* For those who care, we're talking about the building on Victoria Street with the glass fronted reception where soap-dodging climate change cretins would regularly glue themselves to the glass.
Government lease most of their buildings
This right here. Wouldn't be surprised if government ministers and party members held "blind" shares in whatever owns those buildings.
They see investments losing value = they are losing money. In my opinion they use civil service to enrich themselves or their mates and that's low.
Correct action would be to let civil service work from home, see the value of buildings collapse and buy them back for cheap.
My office has gone from 10x20 with a door and windows to a 5x6 cubicle with low walls over the last 20 years. There is nowhere left to go for privacy to think. Or visualize what is happening anymore.
So yeah, noone is interested in breakout rooms and 2x3 cubbies with doors to make a medicalappointmemt without the entire dept knowing about it.
So yay gen-z for saying 'no'.
Back in the early 2000s our team based in Ireland was managed remotely by a U.S. manager who never visited Ireland, in fact he had no clue where Ireland was in the map and kept on talking about how efficient our British prime minister Tony Blair was. At some stage one colleague decided to relocate himself back to his (low cost) home country in southern Europe. A great highly skilled engineer, working sitting at home in sunny southern Europe while being paid in Ireland (at least 3 times what he would have been paid in his home country). He was a pioneer. That was almost 20 years before Covid. It went on like this for 4 or 5 years, nobody in the company knew (except for the teams colleagues) or ever noticed, since he was very good at his job and very efficient. The only one who found out after many years was his local taxman who was wondering what sort of income he was pulling from Ireland while living at home in his original country. He had to move the contract there and get a 60% pay cut. I left the company a few years ago but he was still around
Where I work, the ONLY ones whining about WFH are the office gossips. Based on that, I assume any other worker bee that wants to be back in the office is only interested in getting their captive audience back so they can get back to nattering on about whatever horseshit they like to sniff on their weekends instead of doing their jobs.
Harsh? Don't care. I've never enjoyed working for someone else, but WFH has been the most tolerable work situation I've ever had and I'm not giving it up without a fight. I just need to make it last 2 more years then all y'all can stuff it up yer arse!
During the big IT skills shortage in Sydney, I found myself unexpectedly unemployed after the firm I worked for at the time asked me to falsify some financial data, which I was not prepared to do.
A recruiting agent persuaded me to re-train as a technical support agent and subject matter expert for one of the specialist software packages I had been using in my previous role, and so I fell into IT by mistake.
After a few years, I persuaded my boss that I could do my job just as well from sunny Queensland (given that most of my clients weren't in Sydney, or even Australia), and so I became a full-time remote worker.
After a happy decade working within a short stroll of the beach, my employer was acquired by a multinational corporation, and my boss rang me to say that the new overlords required all staff to work at the office at least three days a week. He offered me the choice of a paid relocation back to Sydney, or a sizable payout; I took the money.
Less than a year after this, Covid struck, and everyone was told to work from home. My old boss rang me and begged me to return to my previous role; But by that time I had spent a chunk of the cash on re-training - as a heavy truck driver. As a food delivery worker, I was one of a tiny number of people who were permitted to leave home during the lockdowns, and driving trucks is great fun (particularly in a spookily deserted city). I wouldn't go back to IT for any amount of money, nor would I trust any assurance that working from home would be permanently allowed if I did.
I have since decided that while the driving is fun, the loading and unloading is hard graft (and I am not as young as I used to be), so now I am a bus driver - the freight loads itself. I have never been happier in my work. I meet interesting people every day, get to tour the city looking at the sights, and am practically impossible to micromanage (but still have immediate support from my employer a mere radio call away). We have a very strong union, and regular pay increases that are linked to inflation.
The moral of the story is not to let your work become a straitjacket. There's always something different you could do to earn a crust, and employers rely on your fear of the unknown to slowly erode your willingness to push back against their increasingly unreasonable demands.
I rejected an RTO mandate before most people left the office in the first place; And it was the best decision I ever made.
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