SCC, one of Europe's largest resellers, orders staff back to their desks for three days a week SCC, one of Europe's largest resellers, is ordering staff to return to the office for three days a work from the start of next month, and terminating its flexible hours trial. As is happening at many organizations in the world of tech, SCC is formally reverting to a more traditional style of working. This also applies to staff …
I think the words he's looking for are "constructive" and "dismissal". It'll be interesting to see how that works out.
I suspect pressure will be applied to those employees to change their contracts. I still don't really get why tech companies, especially ones flogging remote working or collaboration services are doing this. The expression 'eat your own dog food' springs to mind. Or perhaps SCC isn't hiring the right employees. WFH can increase productivity and save money because employers don't need as much office space or costs maintaining that space. As long as the work is getting done, it's great. Measuring productivity is pretty simple, and doesn't mean installing spyware.
My business has mostly been on the design side, and and a lot of 'productivity' tools can't measure key things like thinking time. So I may be staring into space or pacing around trying to figure out how to make something work, which activity monitoring can't measure. I've had staff supporting this kind of work, ie bids, RFPs etc who've pretty much all been home workers. I can measure productivity simply by checking tasks and responses are coming in on time. Or preferably early, which then factors into any bonus or pay rise decisions. Staff aren't stressed by commutes and I think that can be a big productivity bonus. A happy employee is a productive employee.
I also get a bit boggled about the companies that think a 3-day in-office week is a good thing. I haven't needed to buy a season ticket in a while, but those were weekly, monthly or annual, and I've no idea if train companies have come up with an offer that suits the 3-day thing. That seems a lousy idea when general policy is supposed to encourage the use of public transport.
>I also get a bit boggled about the companies that think a 3-day in-office week is a good thing. I haven't needed to buy a season ticket in a while, but those were weekly, monthly or annual, and I've no idea if train companies have come up with an offer that suits the 3-day thing. That seems a lousy idea when general policy is supposed to encourage the use of public transport.
With LNER at least, you can buy flexible season tickets that usually work for something like 10 days in a month. Not enough to meet the ~12 days that 3/week in the office would need and not much cheaper than a standard season ticket (and more expensive than a Hull Trains season ticket)
You'd think they'd have come up with "buy 30 trips" type of ticket by now so you can buy as many trips as you think you'll need to use over a certain span of time, you know "bulk buying". It's not as if that would be hard to do on a computerised ticketing system. They already have so many options that it boggles the mind and confuses passengers anyway, add even more tickets that have even more complex options should be right on the line[*] for them!
* pun intended.
You'd think they'd have come up with "buy 30 trips" type of ticket by now so you can buy as many trips as you think you'll need to use over a certain span of time, you know "bulk buying". It's not as if that would be hard to do on a computerised ticketing system.
Yup. Both the Dutch and the Czech had such systems decades ago, along with some other countries I've visited. Dutch had a 'stripkart(?)' which was rather neat. Buy a bit of card with say, 10 units, bus or tram drivers just stamped off the number of units for the journey.
They already have so many options that it boggles the mind and confuses passengers anyway, add even more tickets that have even more complex options should be right on the line[*] for them!
Yup, and by design to extract more money from customers they've confused, and then extra cash from fines. I guess the closest UK has is probably the Oyster card, which could go national with a bit of will. Tag it in at the start of the journey, out at the finish, deduct fare. But then Oyster is already acting as a bit of a debit/credit card, so why not cut out that middle man and allow regular cards or mobile payments instead. But that assumes customers could trust the system to deduct the cheapest fare and removes the cash cow of people leaving credit on cards, or pre-booking trips that aren't made.
"I can measure productivity simply by checking tasks and responses are coming in on time."
And quality of the responses, no doubt.
How all of it suddenly fails in an open plan office when somebody gets a dot-matrix printer installed on the desk behind you. Obviously a long time ago, but it happened.
How all of it suddenly fails in an open plan office when somebody gets a dot-matrix printer installed on the desk behind you. Obviously a long time ago, but it happened.
People of a certain age can discuss which was the most irritating-
1) dot-matrix
2) daisy wheel
3) golfball
Kids today don't know how lucky they are. Now all they need to do is avoid sniffing the fumes and ozone off the lasers.
Posting AC as an ex-SCC worker...
In my experience they're probably not doing "a bloody good job", unless you define that as doing as little as they can and still get paid their pittance at the end of the month.
Example from my tenure - "Sorry lads, no Christmas Bonuses, it's been a difficult year. But don't be too disappointed, we've still managed to make enough for the Rigby's to buy another airport."
Against that background, are you going to do your best, or are you going to do what it takes not to get fired?
There are some good people working there, and I'd work with them again tomorrow, but there were definitely some who were a waste of oxygen.
I still don't see any evidence to back up claims about better productivity or "collaboration". I've worked fairly much exclusively from my home for the last three decades. Although I'm a sample size of one, I get twice as much done when I'm working from home than I do at any of the company's offices.
This type of "one size fits all" management is what causes normal folk to rename management to manglement.
WFH is great, but it is not suitable for everybody and every job. And even more so, not suitable for every manager...
During Covid my company worked explicitly from home, for the duration of some 12 months or so... it worked great for me, but we lost a few people who could not manage the independence and self-discipline which is an absolute must in such conditions. In my conversations with some colleagues, they have stated that they absolutely cannot concentrate and work from a home environment and they definitely prefer going to the office.
There is the other issue with allowing some people to work remotely: What criteria would be used to determine who can, and who cannot, work from home?
I do prefer working from home, it allows me the peace and quiet to concentrate and be productive. In the office, a lot of time is lost in random chatting, discussions not work related, etc. And at home, if I need to discuss something with a colleague, we can always use chat, or voice/video calls. And because we use such tools, the discussions are kept on topic (most of the time), which saves time.
The problem is that if your manager is not one of these people who can work from home, then you are doomed. The manager will force his/her point of view, regardless of what is the best way to achieve the highest productivity from the employee.
"We'll deal with those on a case by case basis, and talk to those individuals about, you know, how we can achieve the best balance."
This is the sort of menacing talk that would send cold chills down anyone's back.
This sort of talk would better fit a maniacal overlord relaxing in his secret base inside an extinct volcano. Complete with a white cat.
Would you work for someone who speaks like this?
If you do you have my deepest sympathy.
Frustratingly we outsource a large part of our hosting requirements to SCC. Whilst we get weekly visits from our account manager and technical manager from Birmingham, and our hardware stack is in the Birmingham DC facilities, their service desk in Romania and out-of-hours, Vietnam, leaves a lot to be desired support-wise. Very disjointed, teams don't talk to each other and very very long lead times for basic changes (talking two weeks to amend a firewall rule with a new IP)
I wouldn't recommend dealing with them, despite the free doughnuts our account manager brings in every week.
It’s interesting to see companies like SCC shift back to traditional office setups after experimenting with flexible hours. While it’s a tough transition for some, it seems like many organizations are finding a balance between in-office and remote work. Will be curious to see how this impacts productivity and employee morale in the long run.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
