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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.'"
You know, if Boeing were to reel in their telecommuters, that is one thing. But this is the freakin' phone and network company saying that a phone and network just don't cut it as the primary ways to communicate professionally. What sort of message is this going to signal to big corporate customers who want to spend tons of cash on promoting and providing telecommuting solutions for their own staffs? Oh, yeah, nothing.
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I have an idea to be at the office and telecommute at the same time: Invent the holodeck.
The office space would actually be a giant holodeck with holographic cubicles and other holographic office equipment. At each employee's home, a much smaller holodeck would be installed. These holodecks would be designed similarly to the ones in Star Trek, but with one small difference: These holodecks would use a superset of the X11 protocol.
Employees at their home holodeck would feel exactly as though they were at the office. Those who physically commute to the office would feel the same way. The residual self images of all the employees logged in to all the holodecks at any given moment would be mapped onto the big office holodeck as well as onto all the smaller holodecks at all the employees' homes.
Besides saving on gasoline, hours wasted commuting, and traffic jams caused on the nation's highways and streets, this approach would have a few additional benefits as well. For one thing, besides purchasing the holodeck, the employer would not have to buy any other equipment or supplies. All desks, chairs, computer workstations, pens, pencils, post-it notepads, lights, water coolers, vending machines, carpets, and those annoying inspirational posters that say things like Teamwork or Persistence, would all be holographically implemented. This would save big on costs for everyone.
Couldn't some sort of lawsuit be brought against them though. They can't just get rid of people by making huge changes to their jobs, and expecting them to leave. If that was the case, why not just change it so that they were required to work in some remote town in Alaska. I bet you that just about everyone would quit. I'm pretty sure you can't tell someone their job is moving, and that if they don't like it, they can just quit, and get no compensation. I'm sure the same could be said for switching a position from telecommuting to non-telecommuting.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I was at HP when they did this. They didn't make much of a secret that it was being done to try and drive people away from the company to reduce headcount. I suppose it worked to some extent, as many of the people that were "recalled" were working at remote locations where it was impossible for them to commute to an office location. Those people were effectively laid-off, and without getting the nice HP severance package normally received for the major lay-offs HP was doing at the time.
All I can say is I'm glad that I am out of there. HP is still doing anything they can to make it a miserable place to work so people will leave. Last I heard they just eliminating almost all year-end vacation roll-over (Merry Christmas, employees).
I suspect AT&T will start doing some of this kind of thing now. It is much cheaper for them if employees quit out of frustration then if they have to give them a lay-off package. I suspect they'll see a few more of these "changes" that don't seem to make sense until you look at it as a headcount reduction method.
Several years ago Verizon shut down some office buildings (notably in Florida) and basically forced people to work from home. The company provided the DSL and second phone line and paid to ship the contents of their desks to the houses. Flash forward a few years and those same people were told that they must move back into the office. I know at least one person that chose to pay for their DSL and continue to work from home because it was more convenient.
Basically, upper management no longer supports working from home, regardless of the fact that they can be expected to work nights and weekends, especially to work with India.
What is ultimately a challenge is how to measure worker productivity. The business needs to prove that workers are more productive in one setting over the other, but in the real world, you can't just count lines of code.
AT&T clearly has no clue. My wife works from home for a very large company. In fact they let her move out of state where they don't even have an office. They are letting more and more workers telecommute because her company understands the big picture of retaining employees. In fact they pay for our net connection as well as her business phone, fax, printer, and other expenses. Her boss yelled at her for NOT expensing stuff soon enough because its SOO much cheaper for the company to allow telecommuting than bringing them into the office. This company CLEARLY gets it.
I know a lot of the /. crowd loves to work from home, but as someone who has to deal with clueless telecommuters all the time, I think the whole system sucks. Whether it's their home ISP having problems or they too stupid to figure out that they need to actually be on the VPN to access work resources, it's nothing but a huge headache. So for your average geek working from home may be a sweet deal, but for everyone else there should be a computer literacy test given before you are allowed to telecommute.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Companies tend to be dishonest as well, so I don't have major qualms with something like this.
Basically, my point is this: There is some amount of work that I am hired to do. If I am not doing it, whether they think I'm working 60 hours or 40 or 20, they need to either replace me or ensure that I do that work in the future. If I really DID work 60 hours a week and still couldn't muster 40 hours worth of progress, you can be fairly sure I would be let go.
Now imagine the converse. I'm able to make those 40 hours of progress in only 15 hours. Are they going to let me go home early or take extra vacation time? Unlikely. More likely, they'll laugh their asses off as they delight in the fact that they have found somebody 2.5+ times more efficient than average. In other words they expect me to do significantly more work than an average-efficiency employee for the same pay.
Maybe I get a bonus at the end of the year; in good companies, I probably would. It's pretty damn unlikely to be a bonus that is 150% of my base salary though, so I'm still getting shafted there. Maybe I get a promotion that I may or may not want (it happens a lot with technical positions where a tech guy doesn't want to become a manager). The cycle just starts over again.
I don't support lying if you're an hourly employee; I'm not going to say I worked 20 hours if I actually worked 10. But if I'm salaried, and something I'm doing--intentionally or otherwise--is convincing people that I am working harder than I actually am, I have no trouble with it and I'm certainly not going to be in any hurry to correct it. If I am not doing enough work to be worth the money they're paying me, they're perfectly free to fire me. If I am, I fail to see how it matters how much time it takes me to get it done--except in that they might want to exploit my being fast.
"They probably figure - correctly - that they can accomplish as much with half the staff. Most telecommuters suck"
Add in the costs of more office and parking space, facilities/environment/energy expenses, as well as the energy costs expended by people who used to telecommute and now have to sit in traffic, and enter the office in a pissed-off mood because some asshole cut them off, or construction/an accident/road closure/snowstorm delayed them, etc ...
So much for AT&T sabotaging their whole "communications can save your business money" angle. Morons.
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