Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week Dell, after telling employees in March they're expected to be in the office three days a week, has ordered its salespeople to be onsite for the full working week when not with customers and partners. "The announcement was to our sales team stating that we expect them to come into the office or be together with customer and …
yep... The scene: a past job, salesperson is packing up.
"I'm heading <big customer>, I'll head home from there when done"
coworker: "Jim, it's after 5:00pm. You can just say, 'I'm going home'. Besides, <big customer> went home a couple hours ago"
That was over 35 years ago
considering how this particular salesperson's family seemed to grow nine months after a landing each big contract, yes, I think he did.
Side story: I recently came across this salesperson after not seeing him since the early 1990s. He actually remembered my MOTHER (his prenatal instructor) more than me (the person who made him quite well-off by supporting and sometimes landing all those big-contract customers). Ah, well...
"claims to have re-typed the return-to-office (RTO) memo by hand to avoid being identified"
Hail to modern technology. We are basically back to cutting out letters from magazines and newspapers to remain anonymous.
Excuse me, I'm going to run to the nearest novelty store to get an eyeglass disguise kit. There are facial recognizance cameras everywhere around here, too!
Had something like that done to me once, back in the early 1990's. The HR department of a joint I worked for sent out regular paper based surveys about working conditions, staff happiness, etc., etc. One time my boss decided to secretly mark the survey papers before handing them out so he could evaluate everybody's responses. Then everybody was called in to explain their areas of unhappiness. End result: every survey from then on was marked "Extremely Satisfied" and none of the long questions were answered, a practice I have kept to this very day especially in the modern online survey regime where there is a 100% certainty that there will be tracking information submitted with your response.
Reminds me of the time that many of the people in the office got a survey in the post (pre-internet days) looking for information on our future plans and promising that responses were anonymous.
One cheapskate in the office needed to post a letter, so steamed the stamp off the reply envelope - only to find a number under it. A quick check with other envelopes revealed other unique numbers on each one.
That survey was handed over to our company's legal department...
Our HR department are IT illiterate. They sent out a survey claiming it was anonymous. Someone then pointed out the id in the survey link revealed who'd it had been sent to so was far from anonymous.
They had to do a company announcement to apologise because they didn't realise.
Yeah right, they just knew everyone else was IT illiterate and was hoping no one would notice.
The biggest damn cheerleader for all things AI at my place is the damn HR department head. They were so proud when they first allowed ChatGPT to generate a job posting, and in every meeting they attend they are guaranteed to pipe up with some tangental AI "Solution".
This is at a company that does HARD science, like, real research in the physical world - but when it is explained that the models have never been trained to do discovery work in our field, and cannot be trained, until we actually do it...you know, generate the data that a model could train on via physical experiments, they get glassy eyed for a moment. adopted a visionary expression and piped up with a ...."But, We could use AI to do those experiments!!"
The meeting got quiet...junior scientists just cast their eyes down, not wanting to hassle with the HR department...but a senior scientist just looked at HR moppet like an odd specimen on a microscope ste for a moment then asked "You know what we do here, right?"
Anonymous because HR is literate if not sentient.
As a member of a very small team, all of which were sick to the back teeth of our micromanaging manager (We looked forward to Tuesdays, when he sloped off earlier & earlier each Tuesday, so he could spend time with his side piece, he also vanished for about 3 hours on nights to visit her - Until he got caught). We, well me basically said
"As there's 8 of us here, it would be very easy to identify us as belonging to the QA\Final Test department by simple numbers & responses & thereby suffering his wrath, when every other team is in double digits!'
We were merged into another team for the "purposes" of the survey, they also denied the survey to two departing employees who were leaving the next day.
"
would be good idea leave out capitals conjunctions articles punctuation alter order word occasionally just case
"
Type out your reply, translate it to a language with a different character set, translate that to another language with a different character set and then translate That back into your home language for submission. If several people do this, management is going to be scratching their heads that so many employees have such poor language skills.
The rest of us know it's all about micromanagement - the middle idiots keeping a physical eye on their slave peons - and commercial property values. The line "We continually evolve our business so we’re set up to deliver the best innovation, value and service to our customers and partners" is utter PR bullshaite.
It seems to me that these companies are oblivious to their workforces and have distanced themselves so far from reality that they no longer see the employees as a source of their continued profitability.
At some point, losing their high performers will end up with them having a mixed bag of middling management and deadwood/ deadweight to run the show. That can only end well /S
“they no longer see the employees as a source of their continued profitability…”
You know what I find interesting is how these companies one the one hand seek to divest themselves of the good old employees who already know how to do everything, yet on the other hand ask for the exact same experience education and credentials from the new hire.
They want to hire the exact same person as the guy they just fired, so long as it’s somebody else.
(Well I guess it’s obvious: they want the exact same person except the replacement works for a starter wage.)
You won't see another morning
You won't see another evening
Good night
Buenos noches, oh senor
Senorita see ya later
Buenos noches, bye-bye
.... Everybody sing now....
Bye-bye, so long, farewell
Bye-bye, so long, sayonara
Bye-bye, au revoir, auf wiedersehen
When its becoming the norm for large orgs like Dell etc. to treat employees like fodder, surely it will backfire at some point. I would not want to purchase anything from companies who treat people with such little regard.
Hiding finacial mistakes behind "strategy" comments, alternating versions of "the future" (which often contradict) and playing follow the leader, to me signifies a lack of foresight, tallent or skill in the Exec teams.
"Dell, however, is not alone in its efforts to force employees to help justify pre-pandemic real-estate investment, tax breaks linked to employee attendance, and waste time commuting and polluting."
This points to the fact that the tax-breaks are no longer fit for purpose. Any government claiming to have a green agenda needs to revise them.
It is up to the company to decide the work rules based on what they think is best OVERALL for the company, and up to employees to decide if they wish to earn money by working under those rules.
I like working from home. I also value the time I spent at my current job in the office when I first hired in -- it helped me come up to speed rapidly AND I now know (and work well with) several of my coworkers in other teams much better than people who have barely stepped foot in the office in five years. I want to continue to be mostly WFH, but I also recognize many of my skills are best (or only) done "in person".
I've worked with someone who was GREAT at working from home before the world went crazy in 2020. He was easier to reach than most of his in-office teammates, always available, and clearly put in his hours. He treated WFH as a privilege he was granted and needed to continue to earn, not an expected entitlement. I've also worked with people who screamed, "I WORK BETTER FROM HOME! I GET MORE DONE! I'M MORE PRODUCTIVE", and yet, no one is quite sure what they accomplished, why it took so long, and why they were so hard to get ahold of when needed.
Unfortunately, it's really worker-by-worker, and that's shaky legal ground. "You let Mary work from home, why can't I?" isn't going to work well.
So much more to say, except I'm on the clock!
> It is up to the company to decide the work rules based on what they think is best OVERALL for the company, and up to employees to decide if they wish to earn money by working under those rules.
Or, if they have a tiny little trace of initiative, they can push back on a policy they don't like, such as say by trying to publicize something the company would rather hush up. You don't actually have to take whatever your employer gives you just because they're your employer.
" and yet, no one is quite sure what they accomplished, why it took so long, and why they were so hard to get ahold of when needed."
Especially management who have yet to sort out how to measure the performance of employees they can't see warming an office chair.
If somebody is expected to be able to be contacted during the business day, that goes into the contract. There's certainly a wide variety a ways to accomplish that. I work with my customers so they know the best way to communicate with me based on what they need. They know that if I'm with another client, I am unlikely to take their call, but if they leave a message, I'll get back to them as quickly as I can. They know that I dislike texting and sending written information is best done via email. That's how I work. Most of the time I can get back to people fairly quickly and if they've left a message more detailed than "call me back", I'll have the information to hand so I don't have to call them back again. My worst customer got fired recently. Part of that was poor communications and he never got his computer sorted so I could send him links to finished projects uploaded to my server. Initially, we'd meet in town and I'd give him a thumb drive, but that's more time on each job and I told him that it couldn't go on. Now he's paying twice the rates to have somebody doing the work from out of town.
The great COVID pandemic of 2020 generated a forced conversion of work location defaults to "home" for many (but not all) office workers. Many many many other workers either kept working at their work locations, or stopped working.
The interesting reverberations of the "business cycle" (economic fluctuations) stemming from the economic effects of the great COVID pandemic of 2020 have created conditions ripe for employers to switch the work location defaults back to "office".
Acting in their own enlightened self-interest, many employers are taking advantage of the conditions and are switching the default back to "office". I'm fairly certain that they aren't doing this lightly, and that they are reasonably certain that they will benefit from this action. I'm amused by those who aren't running firms insisting that it is all a mistake.
My own take on this great experiment is that: There are jobs that can be done from home, there are jobs than can't. There are people who can/will work well from home, there are people who can't or won't. The intersection of "jobs that can be done from home" and "people who can and will work well from home" is not as large as some seem to think, perhaps due to the egotistical nature of people (what is true for me must be true for most people).
There is perhaps some additional psychology at work here as well... studies show that "loss aversion" is a thing <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpr.12385>. Perhaps the risk of a small number of people acting badly in work-from-home situations leads to employers trying to avoid that loss, especially if it makes them look like fools. On a related note, no one wants to think that the presence of surveillance cameras in businesses, homes and public areas is motivated by themselves, but we see hundreds of businesses and regular people who have decided that being able to keep an eye on things is worth the cost.
Prior to the great COVID pandemic of 2020 there was a slow migration of some jobs to home/remote work locations, if only on a part-time basis. My wife and I both relocated about 3,000 miles from where we lived/worked (onsite jobs) in 2015, for example. She kept her job as a remote worker; her job could (mostly) be performed remotely and she was good at working remotely. I kept my job for a short while. Although I was personally reliable at working remotely, many of the aspects of my job (and my value to my employer) were based on a continual presence within a shared workspace enabling frequent incidental observations and conversations - i.e., some of my most valuable functions for my employer were no longer possible when working at a distance. I had warned my employer about this possibility before relocating, and was unable to disprove it once I relocated, and hence took myself out of the picture (hey - Mr. honest and reliable here, right?).
I think the shared experience of WFH during COVID 2020 was a grand experiment in remote work that otherwise never could have been performed. It will inform future WFH/remote work plans by many employers, and probably led to an overall increase in WFH/remote work options. It is not a one-size-fits-all panacea, however, and employers are opting for the default to be "office." It's their money, and they can and should spend it as they like.
(HOWEVER - I also support (limited) government involvement in keeping employers from abusing employees with respect to "work ends when the employee is off the clock" (i.e., no requiring employees to monitor/respond to e-mail/telelphone calls after hours unless compensated).
If your manager can't tell you're not getting stuff done, he/she/they suck ... and in turn, is likely to be fired.
If workers aren't doing their jobs properly, and there's a chain of managers running all the way to the top, who all aren't doing their jobs properly, that company won't be in business long, I suspect.
The true job of a professional slacker is to locate companies whose slackage goes clear to the top, and get hired on there!
Perhaps many/most middle management jobs are a fusion of David Graeber's "Bullshit jobs" and Sturgeon's Revelation "ninety percent of everything is crud"?
Back in the day there was an apocryphal revelation from a BOFH to a luser "Go away or I will replace you with a small shell script".
I can think of multiple reasons especially from the US:
1. Top down instructions from sharefolders - Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street etc because;
2. Commercial real estate is on the edge with utilisation and city footfall down
3. UN Agenda 2030 / WEF coerce populations to accumulate in / near cities.
4. Senior management paranoia
5. Hiring problems - they hired people remote as easier to find them when flexible
Working in IT support, a lot of my job can not be done from home. Simply put, I can't give you a new keyboard if I am not there.
Apparently, it is really annoying to poor managers that their staff are more productive when somewhere away from them. I have noticed that people do longer hours when they don't spend 30 minutes each way commuting. Businesses benefit from people having fewer distractions and lower costs. The only people who lose out are office landlords!
However, poor quality managers feel insecure because people work better without them messing things up. Senior managers read this as things not working and try and "fix" it by mandating a 100% RTO.
Heating bills etc go up, productivity goes down, commute times and associated pollution increase. Everyone loses!
But it's a very cheap way of making 20% staff leave without doing layoffs
As an extra bonus it's always the worst staff that quit and get other jobs while the most dedicated are the ones that will come back into the office at management's nearest whim
Not necessarily. I'd posit that it's the worst staff AND the best staff who quit. The worst because they know that coming into the office and being observed screwing up is a ticket to the door, and the best because they know that they can and will be picked up elsewhere, likely by a competitor with a more intelligent location policy. So you're left with the mid-level performers, who neither shine not stink, and as an extra bonus, they're the folks least likely to cause heartburn for the mis-managers. Mediocrity wins, and isn't that the story of most large companies?
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"Simply put, I can't give you a new keyboard if I am not there"
I recall that at Facebook HQ there were vending machines for things like mice, laptop power supplies etc. You just swiped your badge and it was billed to your department. That's a far more efficient use of people and would allow more work from home for tech support types. Of course not everything can be supported remotely, but you could rotate through the staff having 1 or 2 on site each day for those kinds of issues
I think a lot of us in user support have seen things that you can's see from home.
"Of course the computer is plugged in! I'm not stupid!
What's that plug having down in front of your screen?
"I don't know. I'm not a computer expert!"
It is much less common now but there used to be people who were proud of being handless with computers. There are still those who really are...
I work for Dell, I work from home most of the times except when I am required to visit customers. In Dell we have to attend a lot of presentations related to the green economy and how this is important to Dell and the society. If I am forced to go back to the office to attend Team s meetings and send Outlook mails, which can be easily done from home, I will sell my hybrid car and buy a 1990 Diesel car. Make sure I will generate that cloud of black smoke in front of the Dell reception every day when I leave at 5pm (sharp)
With VOIP phones, it's just down to programming the phone and plugging it into the internet and it becomes an extension just like old business phone systems in an office block. Add a computer and bang, it's Bob from customer service who might do better if he wasn't in a big open plan office with gaggles of other CSR's all talking on the phone too. Somehow the company has no problem tracking how many calls Bob takes in an hour and what his time per call figure is, satisfaction index, etc. Why is it that the lowest paid jobs are dissected and measured to a gnat's hair yet managers can't seem to figure out if an employee doing A/P is pulling their weight?
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WFH is already halfway to no company culture or need for one. AI will assign portions of work it cant do to a self employed person who will get paid by individual task.
No doubt there are many people that can do the work of 10s of people. Less people with a job. No office softball teams or drinks friday.
What a flippin nightmare. Just a world for the socially malajusted. 90% on some sort of benefits.
Star trek but with realistic slackers instead of the fake utopia.
Top talent has no loyalty to the Dell brand. If the work experience does not appeal to them, they will go sell for someone else in a heartbeat. They can shop the entire nation of potential employers who are amiable toward WFH. Top sales reps are natural self-starters and they do not need the support of in-office peers to excel.
Unless, of course, Dell is targeting low wage sales people who haven't earned their spurs yet. In which case, warming an office chair is the ultimate measure of productivity.
Government (US and UK) have been going on about child care tax credits, stipends, etc. In the US, it's campaigning season so it's a talking point that useful, whether the candidate will do anything about it later, as a way to "connect" with women voters. There was an article on the BBC web site about paid maternity/paternity leave (up to 39 weeks!) being problematic for businesses. There was a good point in there about couples having more babies before those laws went into effect. I'm not against some forms of leave for new parents, but now that newborns and toddlers are covered, the subsidy for older kids is on the agenda. Does government want to make sure then the maximum number of people are in the workforce at any cost? I know of some couples that paid more for child care (special needs child) than the lowest paid one could earn with a qualification for working with special needs children. Giving an advantage to two parent households would make more sense and many times, if somebody would run the numbers, one parent taking time off from working is financially more prudent than both working and paying for child care. Government subsides compound the problem.
OTOH, if one parent can work from home (once the baby is sleeping through the night), their day will be broken up with caring for the child, but there's enough hours remaining to get a bunch done. As the children get older, many days of the year are just getting the kids off to school and making sure they get home and started on their homework in the afternoon as most "child care" winds up knowing where the child is and having an adult present just in case. Less need for companies to pay for weeks and weeks of salary while somebody is on leave and no money/credits needed from government to subsidize child care. I get that some parents would like to rejoin the work force, but if they can't pay to have the child looked after while they are at work, why should I have to contribute?
> There was an article on the BBC web site about paid maternity/paternity leave (up to 39 weeks!) being problematic for businesses.
If that's the one I think it is then that was reporting on a comment by one of the Conservative party candidates.
> There was a good point in there about couples having more babies before those laws went into effect.
Most likely because the laws have been in place for a long time and people were having more babies back then in general.
> Does government want to make sure then the maximum number of people are in the workforce at any cost?
Probably not, no, because they also need the next generation of voters to be created and brought up in the world to vote for their party into the future. So they'll find a balance somewhere.
> but there's enough hours remaining to get a bunch done
Depends if your company mandates you work between certain core hours or not. Plus women often need time off work for themselves after having a child - after all it's a stressful experience and there are physical and mental repairs which the mother needs, especially if she ends up with a mental health condition like postpartum depression or anxiety about being a bad parent etc.
It's also very important for both parents (but especially the mother) to bond with a newborn in their first few months of life. This period should not be distracted by worrying about work tasks, rather the parents should be secure in the knowledge that they are being paid to look after their newborn (reducing stress about money). The public at large benefit too by the population increasing by one, thus providing a future workforce to look after the interests of the country in years to come, not to mention looking after the parents when they become senior citizens.
"Plus women often need time off work for themselves after having a child - after all it's a stressful experience and there are physical and mental repairs which the mother needs, especially if she ends up with a mental health condition like postpartum depression or anxiety about being a bad parent etc."
No argument there. My question is whether the decision to have kids should put somebody's employer on the hook for continuing to pay them a salary while they are off work. I don't have an issue with the requirement that a position is there to return to within a certain time frame if the company is over a certain size. The compound issue is that once the woman is back to work that additional cost to society goes on through government subsidy for child care. Having children comes with costs, but it's a decision that should be made by the parents and the cost borne by them as well.
"while the dregs will have to come into the office every day?"
Fortunately for Dell, it's not just the dregs. People often get themselves boxed in at an employer by not building up a fund that will allow them to tell them to "take their job and shovel it". Lots of other reasons can come into play as well. Whatever employee role you take on, you should always plan to be disemployed with no notice.
I feel a certain amount of freedom now that I own a home, have a well stocked pantry and no debt. I'm not rich, but if I decided to chuck the whole self-employed thing and took a job (without moving), the company would not have me in a hammerlock.
"Isn't making a job increasing untenable by manipulating terms and conditions starting to edge towards constructive dismissal?"
Yes it is ... but US Corps are *Very good* at gaming the Employment laws etc and almost but not quite breaking those laws is a skill !!!
It can be difficult to prove 'Constructive Dismissal' if the corp is dancing around the 'edges' of the law, usually the game is played by a 'team' so the 'coincidental' results are purely 'accidental' in nature as far as the law sees it.
Been there and seen how it is played by experts ... still beat them in court though !!! ... record *everything* [Paperwork, phone calls etc] and get it off-site somewhere *Safe* ASAP.
:)
Never need to waste time applying for a position with those guys.
The list of companies that treat people like crap and advertise that they do so continues to grow. Can't wait to see what quality of workforce they end up with in 12 months.
Gonna be so much easier for the competition to attract the top talent elsewhere.
Ok, so it sounds like Dell are being pretty evil with this very short notice RTO office mandate... but the above has me genuinely interested.
How exactly does this process work? Is it font size? Font colour? The number of spaces between words and paragraphs? Unique wording? Using Unicode instead of ASCII characters? Would just doing a copy / paste into notepad and removing all double spaces and double break lines keep me safe from such a identification scheme? Just how many devious ways have employers found to watermark text?
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