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Workplace Privacy - IBM Hot, Lilly Not
Brahmastra writes "Reuters has posted an article about the best and worst companies for workplace privacy, passing on information from the forthcoming issue of Wired Magazine, and IBM comes out on top. How does your workplace compare?" According to the summary, Eli Lilly was rated "the most notorious Big Brother boss", after "...its invasive background checks of workers after Sept. 11, 2001, some of which led to dismissals."
Remember when IBM was The Man? Not as in "You The Man", but as in "You've sold out to The Man, man!" The Evil Empire? Big, corporate, bad guys? Now, they love Linux, they don't snoop on employees, they fight SCO-style crap, and so on? When did they get all nice-nice?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
So let's see.. This is an article about an article about an article that hasn't been published yet? Awesome.. Let's create news articles by playing that old game of Telephone! Oh wait.. I think that's how the media works in the first place...
So.. This is a comment about a comment about an articl.. Oh forget it..
Geoffeg
In the work place, I expect to have all my correspondence, activity, anything that crosses their network to, at least, be open to scrutiny.
;)
Honestly, my time at work is for working. I know that's not a popular view with some, but it really comes down to asking yourself what you use your time for.
If you're comfortable with your boss knowing what sites you're looking at and he's comfortable with you looking at them, then there's no problem.
But to *expect* privacy I think is assuming you have a different relationship with your boss/company than you do: they're paying you to be there and do a job, and whatever means they take to ensure they're getting their money's worth is reasonable.
With all that said... I did post this from work.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
There are a lot of managers out there. A relatively few number of them actually have any special training, most within IBM have special training. An MBA alone doesn't turn you in to a good manager or executive. IBM knows that and they have a process of creating good managers and execs, just like the military has a process of creating officers. People from the engineering career path decide to become managers, they go through training than then they are managers. At other companies it's an over night process, one day a guy is a senior software engineer and the next he's a manager. Subsequently, the MBAs I've had to deal with who weren't manager tended to be assholes who thought of themselves in a completely different light that the worker bees (just by virtue they should be paid more, drive a BMW and give orders, not all of them but an alarming number of them were that way) and those engineers come managers that I've worked with desparately wanted a number to quantify employee performance without actually knowing how the employees were doing. They either micro managed and their employees could only ever fail because they "could never do it as good as the boss" or they were left totally hands off and the boss had no idea who did what, when or why. At IBM my bosses trusted my judgement, they worked within that, they protected me, they asked my advice on technical matters, they dealt with politics, they were enablers and at the end of each year they had a pretty good idea why I worked for them, what I brought to the table, how i needed to improve and how I was of value; they knew the skill-set that I had and at times they moved me to better match that or to grow those skills in directions I desired. Also at IBM if you screw up, it goes to your manager, you surf porn and it's your manager that hears about it and sees the report, except for a few major offenses it's usually put in to your boss' hands when you do something wrong. Who better knows what the circumstances may be? Who better to judge your value to the company when you screw up?
I think the classic example was a coworker who got caught drinking in his car at lunch time. He was just sitting out there drinking from the bottle, it was a flat violation of policy (I think booze is semi okay at IBM now, they have beer at some functions) well as it turns out his wife had left him the night before. He could have been fired, HR at a midsized company may have just fired him. His manager had a talk with him, gave him a repremand, explained that it can't happen again and didn't fire him. Offered to get him enrolled in some alchohol classes or rehab and at that point this person essentially started to rebuild his life that had just been falling apart.
Now there are always problems, but IBM is a company that is built on trust and when the right people are in the right places and the trust is there they are a very very powerful company and a very difficult company to compete with. They've been around nearly 100 years and I expect them to be around another if they keep to these practices. They are a company to emulate in many ways and the ways they manage and trust their employees is one of them.