Striving to Keep Teleworkers Happy

coondoggie writes "Employees who work from home or in remote branch offices often feel disconnected from corporate life and worry they will be forgotten and bypassed for promotions. Managers and employees have to make a concerted effort to stay in touch, experts say. At IBM, Pelino and others set out to improve corporate culture. The company sparked new life into an old tradition: IBM Club, which brings together employees for intramural sports, picnics, movies and other types of social, cultural and recreational activities."

Comments

Re:the problem with IBM culture is...

[zero_offset]

As it should be. I have personally been opposed to the IT world's infatuation with contractors throughout my very long career in this business. I have been (and am now) in the "front lines" writing code and building, deploying, and supporting systems and applications, and I have been in various levels of management, some quite high, and sometimes at very large companies. I'm generalizing of course, but it is my experience that contractors are a lot more trouble than they're usually worth. Here I'm speaking of true contractors, who come in to do a job, and leave when that job is complete -- the workforce's equivalent of a transient population -- or prostitutes, LOL.

I am also opposed to the perma-temp phenomenon, and now that I'm writing this, I suspect that's closer to the scenario you're describing. A discussion of perma-temps leads to the greatest evil that exists in corporate culture today: Human Resources. I've ranted about it before, and I'll do it again: people should not be treated in the same way you address a shortage of copier-paper and rubber bands. The primary role of HR in large corporations today is to simply make people disposable. Contractors go a long way towards enabling this mindset.

There are a million other angles, of course. I won't pretend I haven't done contract work before, but it's typically to get my foot in the door of a good company, at which point I jump ship and go permanent. Again, I prefer this from long experience working with both sides. And I'll add that in that experience, I've also seen no shortage of contractors with attitudes. We once had an MQ expert on contract with us, and while he was generally a nice guy, when it came to any discussion of contracting versus FTEs, he made it clear that his opinion of going full-time was that only the stupid or incapable did this. Hopefully the door didn't hit his ass too hard on the way out.

Face it, you're temporary. It was your choice. Don't like it? Change it.