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AT&T Calls Telecommuters Back To the Cubicle
bednarz writes "AT&T is requiring thousands of employees who work from their homes to return to traditional office environments, sources say. 'It is a serious effort to reel in the telework people,' says the Telework Coalition's Chuck Wilsker, who has heard that as many as 10,000 or 12,000 full-time teleworkers may be affected. One AT&T employee says rumors have been circulating since AT&T's merger with SBC that the new upper management is not supportive of teleworking: 'We'd heard rumors to that effect, and all of a sudden we got marching orders to go back to an office.'"
My guess is that ATT is betting that a large percentage of the teleworkers will either resign, or come back with such bad attitudes that they will be fired "for cause" shortly after their return.
The reality is that, in the current business environment, it is better for your career to be mildly competent but in plain sight that extremely competent but hidden at home.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Barring that, how about writing up an article and trying to get it into the New York Times (and other large papers) asking the question: Why is AT&T supporting pollution by requiring 10,000 employees to begin commuting to an office once again? Does AT&T _not_ support a green initiative and want to cut down on its carbon footprint in this world? Does AT&T _not_ support cutting down on vehicle emissions by using the very effective telecommute for work? What does AT&T have against saving the planet?
With the wide variety of people focused on green initiatives, carbon footprinting, greenhouse gases, and trying to save the planet surely some bad press thrown AT&T's way making it look bad on the global stage for, basically, FORCING 10,000+ people to begin commuting to work again after years of working from home... Well, even monopolistic giants can be pimp-slapped in the press. Sometimes.
AT&T - Your world. Delivered. To the NSA.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Thats what AT&T WANTS.
AT&T can't reasonably afford to lay off 10K workers. Thats very expensive.
They know that many of their telecommuting workers have built their lives around telecommuting, meaning they just simply can't start going to work. Many of them might not even have reliable transportation. AT&T knows that of the 12K workers they are telling to come back to work possibly half may just quit. AT&T would love this.
You missed that part of my point because I made it poorly. I apologize.
...and when I think of a "larger and less creative organization", AT&T is definitely in the top hundred.
A big part of the problem isn't _just_ that employees aren't as effective (and let's be honest here, it does take discipline), but that there is a management culture that considers presence as being a very important determiner of effectiveness. Management culture which isn't ready for this sort of change is going to be especially poor at judging how (or if) it works.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the employees are just as (or more) effective telecommuting than not:
Managing takes skill, and managing a telecommuting workforce takes different skills. I would argue that it also takes more skill, because you have to get a lot of old notions out of your head, and you have to understand work differently than the management mindset of 20 years ago. If your managers aren't willing to embrace that, they're also probably a lot more likely to assume the worst of you despite what effective output you have, because you know as well as I do that in some work environments, effectiveness is measured poorly by people who think that a passing familiarity with Excel and Powerpoint is more than enough to whip up some statistics, usually getting the basic assumptions wrong.
That doesn't make management right in this case, but it does mean that there's a lot of corporate inertia to get beyond. Think of the companies who have really led the charge here - software, marketing for print and television, design work. The larger and less creative an organization is, the more inertia there is to get past when it comes to embracing a different way of understanding the work environment...