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HP To Cut Back On Telecommuting
Makarand writes "Hewlett-Packard, the company that began
making flexible work arrangements for its employees starting in 1967, is cutting back on telecommuting arrangements
for its IT employees. By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. Those who don't wish to make this change will be out of work without severance pay. While other companies nationwide are pushing more employees to work from home to cut office costs, HP believes bringing its information-technology employees together in the office will make them swifter and smarter and allow them to be more effective."
News just in...
HP moves all nationwide offices to india, any employees who refuse to move are out of a job without servernce pay....
Could they do that, and if they can't, can they move them into offices? I guess its a contract thing, something for me to look out for if i ever telecommute..
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
From an article I read on the effect of telecommuting, employees are *more* effective, or accomplish more, in less amount of time, when working from home, as it allows for a more relaxed atmosphere, among other benefits.
But it's been a little while since I read the article, and I may have it wrong.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
The problem is not the technology, its the people. We allow all of our developers to work at home, providing them with the equipment (VPN, 2nd computer, etc) and technology (1/2 of broadband expenses) to make it possible. But most developers end up coming into the office. Most of them have found that they either A. Lack the self discipline to keep up the pace when working at home and B. They do not have enough access to their co-workers at home despite access to the technology. A lot of our work is multi-discipline, multi-language (Java, C++, C) and spans everything from drivers to applications, our developers simply need real-time access to their peers in order to do the work.
When we have tried this with other aspects of our business it has had similar results. Most people simply lack the self discipline to make turn the telecommuter opportunity into a reality (for them).
This is the first sign that the "pendulum" is swinging toward having local job creation again. HP admitted that having the IT folks TOGETHER makes them better. You couldn't be more apart than California and India.
Of course, your programmers have been telling you this for YEARS, but it takes a pointy-haired boss to implement it.
That's what really pissed me off when I was in the biz. I would ask to work from home and I was ALWAYS told that, "No, we need you here to do your work."
So, I would commute in every fucking day. Then, you guessed it, my job (and others'), were sent over seas to India. Yep, they needed their IT workers there all right!
Romans also had the same problem with slaves. For some reason they couldn't exercise as much influence over their slaves when they worked from home. Of course, instead of whips and chains, HP has employee surveillance and the threat of outsourcing to keep their staff in line.
What's interesting is their non-IT employees can continue to telecommute. I would guess that the IT folks being forced to relocate and physi-commute aren't too happy about that.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
I hope they've thought this through. They say that high performers can keep telecommuting, but I somehow doubt they'll allow that due to morale issues. The clued people who can perform while telecommuting are the same people who can easily find new jobs. If I was being asked to relocate because they won't let me telecommute anymore then I'd consider if I really want to work for a company that says they no longer trust me.
When you lay off your least valuable folks and then start doing stuff like this your most valuable folks start looking. You end up with the people that aren't good enough to get hired elsewhere but probable were gonna be on the next layoff list. Yeah, that's really the kind of people I want supporting my mission-critical gear...
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Before I get hammered this is the right thing to do. Flexibility is great and being able to work for a few hours on Friday from home when taking comp hours for the rest of the day is efficient and great. Or working from home when you are waiting for the guy of the telecom. Great that's good for the firm and the worker.
But telecommuting for most of the time is stupid and neither good for worker nor firm.
1) My problem is distraction, when I have to finish something I can work from home, that's ok. But if nothing is pressing on me hard I'm simply not disciplined enough. For this a work environment is great to keep focussed.
2) Teamwork. I'm working in an international firm and it is working by and large, but Messanging, calls, emails only get you so far. Being able to walk 5 meters and chat someone up is completely different. It is very complicated to coordinate work over three continents and too many timezones.
3) Teamwork Part 2, how will you develop something like Teamspirit and good cooperation if you have only seen most of your team a couple of times?
4) line between work and home. I do work enough, when I'm coming home and can say so it's over let's go drink a beer or watch some TV, that's refreshing.
So I'm all for flexibility but please don't overshoot.
I coulda SWORN the idea behind telcommuting was that you didn't waste time driving or putting up with office-related BS. I know that having a home office alows greater flexibility (which apparently is a bad thing to HP). But as introverted and "leave me alone and let me work" as most programmers and IT personnel are, why would you force them into a room and waste more of their time getting to an environment they hate? I smell backlash. This is akin to offering insurance benefits and then recanting after years.
Touting MyEclipse AJAX Tools
Hmm .. I could not disagree more. I think, like the abuse of email with spam, telecommuting has been abused to the point where the Corporation (pick one) now realizes that people *do* work better face to face and yes, under some pressure to perform work. Now, I'm sure a substantial percentage of telecommuters work better, more hours, etc., than their face-time counterparts, but probably enough have abused this privilge to spoil it for those that can work effectively at home.
Plus, I see this as a trend to where, the Corporation will evaluate you in the office setting first, before allowing you the luxury of a 5 second commute.
From TFA:
In an office, ``you're able to put teams together that can learn very aggressively and rapidly from each other,''
Agreed, IMO lower skilled work environments are much better suited to home working. For example call centre work etc. The only reason I say this is that everyday I go into work and I learn something new from the people around me. Not to say this is "agressive" but if I get stuck on a bit of code, or perhaps a general concept I know that others around me may be able to help, and if they cant then we have discovered something that we as a group are lacking in.
Otherwise these thing go unnoticed, you recieve no critism and do not learn as effectively. Ideally in a team the stronger members of the group can carry the weaker members until they have caught up with the rest.
I cant see how this could be as effective in homeworking, in fact some animosity may occur towards weaker members due to percieved "lazyness" when actually they are just have legitimate trouble with their task.
The building management teams are going nuts trying to fit more people in less capacity. They weren't warned about the telecommuting initiative when planning began for the consolidations.
Many staff are having their cube-space halved, some of the hot-desking areas are not much bigger than 1sq metre. Teams that are being told they have to come back in are sometimes getting half the cubes they need for the number in the team, so many have to hot-desk.
Adding to this, HP's closing many smaller outlying sites and those people have to travel to the bigger sites. The buildings will certainly be crammed to the rafters with people.
Should singles who deliberately choose that lifestyle to be frugal receive less benefits?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Here are my thoughts on this:
l -telecommuting-for-its-it-division/.
* 180-degree turns are traumatic, and don't turn out well. This is one such change, and it will be messy and painful. It will alienate a lot of bright folks. From a management standpoint, it's not right. Change is best done gradually, and by co-opting people.
* Making the bright people come into the office in order to straighten out the poor performers, as HP's CIO hints, is yet another silly decision. Yes, I can tell you certain IT personnel should be on-site, but not everyone needs to be there. If HP's IT workforce is peppered with poor employees, this is a recruitment/management issue, not a telecommuting issue. The decision is a non sequitur. If your tire is flat, plugging the exhaust pipe won't solve the problem. Seems to me a much better solution would be to pair up the poor performers with good performers who live in the same area, and have them work together on issues, whether it's at someone's home or my IM/phone. Training would also be another solution.
I wrote about this in more detail here: http://www.comeacross.info/2006/06/04/hp-to-cance
ComeAcross -- You never know what you'll find.
There are a lot of computer companies that, in my opinion, sell garbage products, products that cause IT professionals grief, or would if they weren't eliminated.
HP's products are worse than garbage, in my experience. They are scary garbage. I tried to un-install an HP printer driver and the un-install program deleted more than 900 files in the WinNT folder, files belonging to the operating system, not HP.
An HP technical support person told me to solve a problem with an HP printer driver by renaming an HP file so the driver could not be used.
Another HP technical support person told me to solve a problem with an HP network printer driver by not trying to use the network facility.
When installing an HP printer, it has been common that there are error messages. This is during installation. We stopped buying HP products because of that.
It's sad to see HP on a downward spiral. Lou Platt was a terrible manager. Carly Fiorina was FAR worse. I'm guessing the company is rated about 0.1 Enron now.
Watch for this: The top managers of HP will destroy the company, but will still take home tens of millions of dollars in salary and "bonuses", as Carly Fiorina did. Top managers have become enemies of companies and enemies of society.
I don't know if this is true, but it has been said that HP would not be profitable if the company could not sell Inkjet printer ink for $800 per gallon. If that is true, then it is possible that HP is not primarily a computer company, but is primarily an "expoiter of customer ignorance" company.
HP was once a company admired by everyone.
I agree with previous comments that probably HP is planning to fire the employees.
Nicole C. Wong, the author of the article did a surprisingly good job in writing it. Normally business writers are clueless about technology.
--
Edwards: George W. Bush is the "worst president of our lifetime".
Right, and don't forget to put the right cover sheet on your TPS report.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Kind of like in those IBM advertisements in magazines where the guy goes crazy and duct tapes the entire office staff together. That'll certainly make everyone collaborate better.
In a big company, lack of communication can be a bigger obstacle to getting your job done than ability. The ones hanging around the bubbler might learn more about what's going on, and know who to call when they have a problem or need information. The ones grinding away in their cube just send stuff up the chain of command. And I know how weak the links can be in those chains.
I telecommute as well as working in the office. As a Systems Admin I can do most of my job remotely and my bosses use telecommuting as a way to pay for productivity. I know when to work at home and when I'm needed in the office and have gone out of my way to make sure that my productivity has increased since I began telecommuting.
When someone uses the "a few bad apples spoil it for the whole bunch" argument, they don't address the probability that productivity increases as a whole, even with those bad apples. In this particular case, a Wallyworld manager goes to HP and begins treating IT professionals just like they treated the illegal immigrants and sub-minimum wage unskilled workers back at Wallyworld.
Telecommuting isn't for everyone, nor for every job, but taking your lead on this issue from a Wally World manager is like asking a NeoCon for advice on social responsibility in government.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
Very simple: is the work being completed on time and in an acceptable volume?
If the answers are yes than you have an efficient telecommuter, if not , you don't. And if the manager can't get this through their cobweb filled head then THEY are not operating efficiently and should be replaced.
This is just another case of beating on the worker because of ineffectual management.
"By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. Those who don't wish to make this change will be out of work without severance pay."
And the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Regards;
Perhaps they realized that there's value in gosipping over the coffeepots, durring 'break' times. Engineers are used to kibizing on each other's projects.
Japan, S. Korea, and many European countries are imploding because too few choose to pass along the investment (food, housing, education, time) they received as children. There is a large economic payoff to childless individuals, yet a high cost to society overall if too many take that route. Families are what keep society going, so society has a vested interest in promoting family. No reason to turn it into a religious debate, just look at the demographics.
The more the new executives and managers chase the bottom line, the more HP will suffer (the more brilliant people will leave), and the worse they will fare in the market. I expect someone to acquire HP for the name at some point in the not-to-distant future. No doubt it will seem like a smart move to the new Wal-Mart managers, when looking at the "bottom line".
If you're the type who needs a work environment to keep focused it would be better not to telecommute, but I bill less when the customer lets me work at home and get more done. It's not that hard to monitor performance in a remote development environment. Either someone is making their milestones or not, closing trouble tickets or not. I can look at their code and tell how long it should have taken vs the actual billing. What I save in clothes, gas and commute time is invaluable. My equipment, my dev environment, my work space at home are all set up for how I work.
A phone list and a speaker phone is all I need for quick consults, fax machine for paperworks, we keep code libraries in common access areas accessible via VPN if I need something. I find interaction at work actually detracts from production more often than helping it. There are times when face to face meetings are unavoidable, like gathering requirements and monitoring user interaction on betas, but other than that I'd say a full 75% of interuptions at the office are at best unproductive and frequently just plain annoying. If I have to forward my office phone, my productivity tanks. If I can check messages a couple times a day that's better.
For people interested in playing politics or needing interaction with other people, an office is necessary. For me the more you leave me alone, the more I'll get done. Sometimes I'll collaborate with other developers...I work with a graphics guy in California regularly. We can work together almost like we're in the same room. We've had three way phone confernces where we've all been hammering away on our part of the app, yapping back and forth on the speaker phone. It was very much like being in an office.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
>How can you measure efficiency if the guy works at home? That's the problem.
Some jobs have a direct, measurable effect on the bottom line. Bet they aren't the ones being cut.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Hmmm married workers more valuable? That is, until they have to leave work early to pick up their kids and take them to soccer practice, call of sick because their kids are sick, talk on the phone all day planning their upcoming vacations to disney world, etc. while the single people in the office are left holding the bag. More valuable? I think not. Then again, I did see your smiley so hopefully you are joking and/or a troll!
In her internal consulting role, she liases with HP people both in Europe and the USA - consequently, she can start work at 7am (for the Europeans) and finish as late as 9pm (for the Americans). No, she doesn't do a 14-hour day everyday but I would say that she averages out about 10 hours per day and she *does* work all of that time - so whilst she's contracted for a 40-hour week, she easily puts in 45-50 hours a week based on the number of days she works from home currently.
Her current office, in Reading, is about 30 minutes drive from our home - she goes in about twice a week, she tends to start for 8am in the morning and aims to finish about 5pm to the gym on her way home. So whilst she does do 8 hours in the office a day, it's generally less hours per day than working from home.
Now consider this. The Reading campus is closing in July and she (and her colleagues) are being moved to the Bracknell campus, about an additional 30 minutes on her travel time from our house. She will not be able to have her own desk because (apparently) HP have a *shortage* of several thousand permanent desks in the UK - so even when she gets to her office, she's no guarantee of getting a desk.
So, in summary, now that she will have to spend two hours in the car daily (as opposed to one hour twice a week), she will make up that additional travel time from the additional hours she put in at home each week because she sees no reason why her personal & entertainment time needs to suffer - consequently, HP get less work out of her.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Carly Fiorina was the strongest proponent of sending American jobs to India, effectively creating an entire industry of telecommuting.
Now HP is saying telecommuting is bad?
Face it. Corporations want to be slave-drivers, and it's only through democratic lawmaking that we keep them from getting their wish.
I'd say married workers are more pliable, more risk-averse, more likely to put up with a shitty work situation, and more likely to "go along to get along".
While losing a job is tough on anyone, a single person can quit to leave a shitty situation and only be putting themselves at risk. A married person with kids is likely to be more docile because if they quit/get fired, they have to take care of the spouse and rug-rats.
So, of course management likes married people with kids, as it's a shackle they didn't even have to pay for.
And it's for this precise reason that companies in trouble almost always fire all of the engineers and people producing product while ramping up the sales force.
The next step is left as an exercise for the reader.
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
(ObDisclaimer: I work for HP IT. But if you're looking for a "Randy Mott/Mark Hurd Sucks" message, this isn't it. HP has a very vocal set of internal fora for bitching at management. I do my whining through the media which might actually effect change. Slashdot, I'm afraid, isn't it).
Firstly, the policy of colocation is not just tied to telecommuters - the idea is to centralise a highly distributed IT workforce. So, eventually, nearly all IT workers will need to relocate to a few central locations. The teleworkers are just first on the list for relocation.
Secondly the problem for many IT firms is not telecommuting per se, it's the fact that we've just sleepwalked into teleworking without a clear business analysis as to whether the business operations can effectively sustain this model of working in each case. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. Now, this is a historic failure of management - senior employees get sufficiently pissed off with life in the Bay Area, or Houston, or Atlanta, and feel the need to get a quieter life in Dogshit, Nebraska. Fine and dandy - but it's effective management to say "Sorry, we can't have you in your current job doing that". Neither mean, nor incorrect - just a manager doing his/her job in keeping the department going. But we don't do that - we just say "Yeah, sure. Get an ADSL line, we'll be cool". Sometimes it's true - sometimes it's not. Now - how do you pull that position back into line? In HP, that's Randy Mott's problem. He's got a system that's been allowed to grow wild in many areas and is, to all intents and purposes, out of control.
Randy Mott has an extremely aggressive set of targets in trying to push up the efficiency of HP's IT. Maybe he's going about it the wrong way - if so, he'll pay with his job.
--Ng (not in any way speaking for HP, HP IT, or Randy)
HP has moved away from innovation and toward the bottom line. HP was very successful and well known for many years due to the unusual quality of its corporate culture and products. But the above poster's comment about HP/Wal-Mart is dead on.
It appears HP decided to copy Dell, who admitted they were a marketing and distribution company and not a "technology" company.
At face value it seems logical to copy your most profitable competitor. However, there is also the issue of niche. There may only be so much room for Walmartization of PC's. There is also a niche for innovation, which HP *was* well-qualified to shift into similarly to how Apple's niche or specialty is user interface (both hardware and software-wise), not price.
By trying to me-too Dell, HP will shoot itself in the foot because it is not geared towards what Dell does, alienating its innovation-hungry work-force in the process. Thus, it will be neither innovative enough nor cheap enough (Dell-style). They should take a lesson from Apple, not Dell.
Table-ized A.I.
The architect of the HP division's change, Randy Mott, is regarded by Wall Street as a mastermind of operational efficiency based on his days as chief information officer at Wal-Mart Stores and Dell.
Heh. It's a cheap stealth layoff. Quite a few of the telecommuting workers won't go along with the change, and will find other work. Telecommuting IT employees tend to be more senior (both higher salary, and older). This both gives HP IT a dodge around US laws establishing protected-class workers (over age 40), and allows a fairly cheap staffing reduction:
By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. With many thousands of HP IT employees scattered across 100 sites around the world -- from Palo Alto to Dornach, Germany -- the new rules require many to move. Those who don't will be out of work without severance pay, according to several employees affected by the changes.
Employees who don't play along are not laid off, but instead either quit or are terminated for cause. This dodges the legal issues (42 USC 2000e and the ADEA, see also http://www.eeoc.gov/), and avoids severence pay and contract issues.
Randy Mott is known as a real "fix it" guy in IT Management circles. This move will get him well on the way of accomplishing a streamilining of HP IT. (IT workers are probably well aware of what management streamlining means for them...)
Society wouldn't "implode". You're implying a lower birthrate means a society disappears, which is mathematically silly. A lower birthrate means the population shrinks for a few generations, then stablizes with lower numbers, which is a GOOD THING.
Sounds like someone needs to go back to school.
Believe it or not, a lower birthrate DOES mean a society disappears in exponential decay. Some mathematician figured that at the current rate, there'll be like 13 Japanese people by 2500 or 3000 or something.
Negative population growth will be a much bigger issue in the next hundred years than overpopulation.
We've too many people on the planet, eating up too many resources, killing too much life, producing killer pollution.
Sigh.
You know our current problem with food is having too much production, right? The famines ever since the Green Revolution have been caused by political issues, not by actual lack of crops.
The countries with reduced population will be winners, and the cancerously growing populations of doomed countries will self-destruct in the usual Malthusian manner
Ah, yes, there it is. I thought you sounded like a Malthusian. Which is great and all, except Malthus has been proven wrong. Repeatedly. He made some fundamental mistakes in his assumptions, and unfortunately for everyone, fools have been repeating these same mistakes for 200 years.
Having a small population is a recipe for disaster in a country.
Countries with reduced populations have never been winners in history in the long run. Even small countries who have done well, like the Netherlands, have eventually been eclipsed by the bigger countries. It is critical to have at least a small amount of population in the world, for a variety of reasons.
The causes of the horsemen are not political in the truest sense; population pressure is always the root cause.
Like most of Malthusian beliefs, this one is demonstrably false. I'd be curious to see how you'd try to relate something like the Vietnam War to population pressures in America and the USSR.
Nothing, no organism, can grow ceaselessly.
This is the core fallacy that is the root of all the problems with Malthusian beliefs.
Humans are not organisms, beyond the scientific definition. We don't fit into the K or R population models that all creatures, from flies to baboons fall into. Humans are unique. Why? It's simple: humans make their own food. And the birth rate drops as humans get more food (or are more successful over all), which is the opposite of what you see in the animal kingdom.
If you are really concerned about overpopulation, which I guess you might be even though you're not very well informed, the best thing you could do is work to build a strong middle class world-wide.
At some point, it poisons the environment with its own effluent and kills off both room to live and the food supply.
More tripe. Unlike animals, humans build things called Sewer Systems. Have been doing it for a while; you might want to look into it some time.
Humans who maintain a steady state population, intelligently, will have resources to live and to educate, while those who do not will inevitably collapse into warfare, disease, ignorance and (usually religious) totalitarianism through sheer desperation.
No... they'll invade the countries with the smaller populations and take them over. Religious Totalitarianism? I'd say radical communist dictatorships are a bigger issue. Consider the famine in Ethiopia. We had enough food to feed the people -- the communism is why over a million people died.
They will be the danger to to the planet, already warming and drying under the strain of a population doubling every two generations.
More than half the world lives in countries that aren't producing enough babies to replace their population. If the very deep and serious problems in Africa ever get solved (and I think
You haven't lived in any of the mentioned countries, I would guess. The level of racism in places like Japan and Korea would never allow that. (I spent 15+ years in the area, and I know - I think I know, anyway - what I am talking about. Although, I must admit, I have only experienced blatant in-your-face discrimination twice. I used to hear HORROR stories from foreigners in Japan all the time.)
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Remember that HP is attempting (and succeeding VERY well) a huge cost-cutting effort. One of the largest efforts in this attempt is the effective reduction of headcount by around 10%. This effort (end to telecommuting for IT) is targetted at about 1500 (1%) employees. Many are biting the bullet and moving. Some have been able to locate new postions within the company. A very large percentage will leave HP. Most of the 1500 employees effected have been with the company a very long time. Most were with HP during the internet boom when the company was doling out multiple raises in a year in an attempt to keep talent while dot coms were very attractive. Thus, these employees are making FAR TOO MUCH money and it whacks HP's ability to reduce IT expenses to the desired target level. Once the "expensive" headcount is out-of-the way, there may be a return to normalcy. Don't be surprised, however, to see the tactic used in a few other of the companies areas. I'd be willing to bet on a return to "normal programming" in 24 months. Occupancy rates will become more important. Benefits related to fuel costs will attract talent coming out of education. Most remaining US-based IT employees (project managers, architects, technical leaders) do not work with other IT professionals. They work with business teams who report to other organizations for brief periods for a project. They then move to other projects and business teams. Ither IT professionals (developers, administrators) will be outsourced. So, to the current HP employee, I suggest patience and acceptance. For those that can (lots of years, but not enough to retire), consider split residence. The $2K per month may turn into an investment if you only have to do it 18 months. It's hard! Sorry for the ramble.
There is also a niche for innovation, which HP *was* well-qualified to shift into similarly to how Apple's niche or specialty is user interface (both hardware and software-wise), not price.
Exactly right. Somebody at HP said, "we're going to compete with Dell on Dell's turf, by Dell's rules, with higher expenses than Dell."
I'd like to know which business school that guy went to.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)