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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."
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!
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
Telecommuting is good when the job is not emergent and requires a high amount of concentration (architecting, engineering, designing, given you have the tools at home).
The very sort of people HP is calling in from the home.
However if your job is routine, technical, and requires lots of work, associated with stress, telecommuniting can make you lazy, slack often (having no control) and doing a bad job overall.
The very sort of people the new HP manager behind this move is used to dealing with in his previous job at Wal-Mart (no, that's not a joke. RTFA).
KFG
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.
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)
I'm a telecommuter- I work 80-90% of my time at home; I go into the office about once every week or two. My commute (when I do go in) is 36 miles each way, and in Atlanta traffic, takes about 1.5-2hrs each way. I'm lead developer on a small (4 person) team for a private medium-sized ($300m/yr and ~2000 employees) company. I'm a contractor, but have been there for a little more than three years now, so I'm a full employee by almost any definition.
:)
Pros:
1) I'm a lot more productive at home. Everybody has been through that - they can just get more done.
2) I'm a developer, so I really don't need to interact much beyond my own team, and through daily phone conferences, personal phone calls, IM, and email, we stay connected.
3) Traffic makes my blood boil, and the idea of losing 4hrs/day sitting in traffic just makes it sound that much worse.
4) I am less productive before noon and more productive late at night. I try to stick to a 9-10 through 5-6 schedule, but if I get an idea late at night, I can crank out some code without having to be in my office.
5) I have my own office at home. It has dedicated computers for work, a desk, and all the "comforts" of work, plus a radio and a decent view. When I'm done for the day, I can shut the door and leave it behind. I have a separate work phone number, and after a certain time, I don't answer it.
6) Fuel savings - $3/g @ 25mpg * 72miles * 5days => $43/week on gas. Not horrible, but that's assuming I'm not sitting in traffic. $43/week ~= $2100/yr. This easily makes up for my extra expenses I bring on myself from working at home.
7) I can visit out-of-town friends and family and work from there as if I'm still in the office. This takes a LOT more discipline, though, and I only do it rarely.
8) My business wardrobe is hardly anything. Most of my days are spent in shorts and a t-shirt.
9) I can listen to whatever damn station I want and turn up the radio as loud as I want (although always just barely on).
Cons:
1) I can "get stuck" at home for days or even a week at a time, with no real reason to leave the house. I have to look for reasons to get out. You can start to miss the normal, everyday interactions with other people. This is probably the biggest disadvantage to me.
2) Motivation is sometimes a factor, but it is in the office sometimes as well. Granted, I have the freedom (as an hourly contractor) to take off half an afternoon and not bill for it, and working at home makes this easier.
3) Working at home does take a lot of motivation and self-discipline. I find that I don't have too much trouble, esp. if I set goals for the day/week/month and stick to them. This should be true in any job situation, though.
I've telecommuted for other companies in the past ~6 years (small startups, side gigs, and worked for a London-based company for 18 months). All the above points all still hold true. Yes, you may miss things like working with the team, the team interaction, etc, but I find that we all do just fine; this is partly to do with the fact that I've always worked on small teams of very competenent people.
To address the points in the above poster:
1) I agree- disipline differs for everyone. Some people can work remotely effectively; others cannot.
2) I agree with being able to talk to people, but using IM and email can work wonders as long as you're verbose. Plus, you have a papertrail for everything.
3) Physically seeing the team is not a prerequisite for team spirit. The guys on my team all feel that we're part of the team and work as a team. And when the product fails or succeeds, we feel it as a team.
4) I have an office at home; I shut the door when I leave. If you have any 40+ hr/week job + commute, it's going to eat up your weekly life anyway. I find I get more personal time when working at home.
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.
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.
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.
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