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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.
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.
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.