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HP CEO Meg Whitman To Employees: No More Telecommuting For You
McGruber writes "AllThingsD has the news that Hewlett-Packard has enacted a policy requiring most employees to work from the office and not from home. According to an undated question-and-answer document distributed to HP employees, the new policy is aimed at instigating a cultural shift that 'will help create a more connected workforce and drive greater collaboration and innovation.' The memo also said, 'During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck. We recognize that in the past, we may have asked certain employees to work from home for various reasons. We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration and the more employees we get into the office the better company we will be.' One major complication is that numerous HP offices don't have sufficient space to accommodate all of their employees. According to sources familiar with the company's operations, as many as 80,000 employees, and possibly more, were working from home in part because the company didn't have desks for them all within its own buildings."
But I'm running behind...
This one was aimed at Microsoft, but HP certainly deserves it too.
http://2eq9hztv2wc1k6odx469m9znq0.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2012-11-06-at-10.53.18-AM.png
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
NSA has killed telecommuting as we knew it for the foreseeable future (20 years, at least, hence).
Monkey Do!
Marissa Mayer
The HP Way
RIP
October 08, 2013
nt/
CEO makes blanket policy decision, backs it up only with "Because I said so," film at 11. In other news... this is the human equivalent of marking your territory by peeing on something, then kicking up grass. Will it screw a lot of things up? Of course. Will anyone complain? Assuredly not. Is it news? No. We have a term for this kind of behavior in corporate america: Tuesday.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This is just typical - they're trying to shed employees, cut staff, make money. That's what the Compaq merger was about. It had nothing to do with computers and had everything to do with Compaqs crappier HR policies which were adopted as HPs, saving the company millions, forever. My wife lost a week and a half of vacation time because of that. Dicks.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I guess HP is in the market for real estate in Colorado
Hey Meg,
Just a word of warning; this will not work. If they can't figure out how to communicate with IRC and all the rest of the internet at their fingertips, they're sure as fuck not gonna get along any better when you cram them in a conference room at the ass crack of dawn and shake them up to see if they fight.
Sincerely,
The Whole Motherfucking Internet.
Meg is a copycat CEO.
So on the one hand due to executive incompetence, product quality suffers, sales go down and the stock tanks, then some CXX suggest cutting down on office space and having employees telecommute to save on overhead, then due to executive incompetence and marketing/sales trumping product design and innovation, sales go down, and the stock tanks. Now they say they need employees to come in to the (now non-existent) offices, yet something tells me that it's just another example of executive incompetence resulting in poor sales, bad products and the stock tanking.
This Sig does not Exist.
Suddenly require them to come into the office. Many won't be able to, so you can downsize without the bad publicity or cost of layoffs/severence-pay.
From what I hear, Dunder Mifflin has some spare office space - which is already stocked with HP computers.
Why now?
During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck. We recognize that in the past, we may have asked certain employees to work from home for various reasons. We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration and the more employees we get into the office the better company we will be. Belief in the power of our people is a core principle of the HP Way Now. Employees are at the center of what we do, we achieve competitive advantages through our people. HP has amazing employees who are driving great change. We believe the more employees we have working together, the better for HP and our customers.
How does this support the company strategy end culture?
We want to make HP a great place to work and build a stronger HP Way Now culture of engagement and collaboration. Employees who are more connected tend to be more collaborative, productive, and knowledgeable They will also have a greater sense of the company goals and experience a greater sense of pride in HP. We believe that having employees work from the office will unite and inspire them to achieve higher levels of operational excellence and innovation.
if it's so much better for the company then why the hell were you "asking" people to work from home in the first place?!
P.S. prepare to be disappointed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
My wife works for HP (as a telecommuter) and she's pretty high up - and I'm pretty sure this is false. There were rumors of a 'no telecommuting policy' for the last couple of months, but nothing came of it. I'm guessing Meg & Co took heed of the negative feedback on that idea.
Even better yet, offices are standing-room only.
...so they can 'innovate' by not being able to hear themselves think because of the 'collaborating' going on at the desks around them.
I work in a place like this. Its easy to identify the people that are actually getting shit done. They have headphones to block out all the jabbering.
I work for a small virtual company - 30 employees in 5 states.
The luxury of a small firm is you can be sure everyone pulls their weight.
When you have tens of thousands of employees, statistically speaking, you will have tons of "dead wood". Maybe there will be "secret" exceptions to the "no telecommute" rule, maybe not.
Whether this works out for HP or just drives the cream of the crop to smaller companies, time will tell.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I work for HP, many levels below our CEO.
This undated document has not been distributed to employees. Most of us first heard of it today in the tech press. There is no actual *room* at all the HP offices to pull in all the employees. In fact, I understand that back when HP first started pushing telecommuting, they took the opportunity to do the logical thing, and shrink and close most of their field offices.
So, short form, this news isn't news, because it's not a happened, and probably isn't.
Putting a few more slugs in a very dead, rotting horse then beating it.
To be completed in a few years here in Cupertino. Almost all the real estate for it is coming from former Hewlett-Packard sites. As far as I know, the only part that isn't is Pruneridge Avenue between Wolfe and Tantau. I understand they'll be plowing that under as well.
There were two campuses. One was Ridgeview Court, which sprawled across seven or eight buildings south of Pruneridge. (I'm pretty sure these were among Tandem Computer's facilities before Compaq and then HP.) The other was a campus to the north of Pruneridge. It's all being torn down for Apple's new digs.
HP also had a facility in Mountain View too. Something's happening there now, I think, but it had been empty since roughly 2002.
All they've got now, for the most part, is a complex in Sunnyvale that used to belong to Palm, and Phillips before that, no bigger than anyone else's in the neighborhood.
I realize these are only a few sites in Silicon Valley, but the same thing probably happened in other places across the country where HP had a presence. It's a pity HP couldn't have been a bit more forward-thinking, but that died with the HP Way about the time what's-her-name finished having her way with the company.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
The chairs need rearranging.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
.
Contrary to the opinion of most [clueless] managers, it is not about the slackers.
,
It is about communication among the team.
If you hire good employees, then you should not need to be concerned about the number of hours they are working, except to make sure they are not working too many hours.
.Lee Iacocca - "I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way."
That's what you get from appointed "managers" whithout corporate vision.
The result will be just the opposite - HP will hemmorage people moving on with no layoffs required.
The saving will be great for a short time. And renting additional office space will drive up the costs sinking the company even deeper.
It could just be a rumor. A feeler for public opinion. But if it isn't - RIP HP.
why do shitty CEOs still get jobs? What HP investor could possibly want that idiot in charge?
Just when I finally got rid of all my pants.
Subject says it all.
Oh, so you still think you work for HP?
What if you telecommute because you are disabled and it is the only way to get to work?
Meg Whitman - a totally hideous person - mean, small, vindictive - has no ideas of her own, so she's just stealing Marissa Mayer's bad idea. Both are insanely wealthy people who literally have no clue how the proles who work for them actually live their lives. Step by step, the US stumbles toward its own French Revolution, but ours will make the one of 1789 look like a walk in the park.
I'm not liking this trend at all. The main thing I like about my job is full time telework. But realistically, if this trend catches on, I'm the most likely guy to be recalled to office boredom in the entire corp. :/
"We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration "
That's why half the damn company works in India. If they really cared about that, they would not only bring everybody into the office, but also hire people back here in the US. It's only about power, jumping on this new corporate bandwagon, and making it look like people will somehow be more productive or accountable.
When you're here I know you're unhappy and that's the same thing as work.
...80000 pissed off HP employees are looking for new jobs. And guess who will easily jump ship? The good ones.
This decision might not be as stupid as it sounds. In a lot of cases, "telecommuting" actually means "not working". It's easy enough to stay on top of one or two people who like to work from home a lot, but it's almost impossible to manage several employees remotely. Didn't Yahoo eliminate telecommuting recently, as well? I believe their decision was done, partially, because the IT guys discovered that many employees were only sending one or two emails per day (average employees sent way more) and often never logged in via VPN for multiple days in a row. Obviously, there's work that can be done without a connection to the company network, but there isn't three days worth of it each week. Far too many people think that working from home means that one should act like they're at home when, in fact, they should be acting like they're sitting in a very odd looking room down the hall from their regular office.
Also, face-to-face meetings are a good way of getting things done. Yes, conference calls and email are great, but being in the same room as everyone else can make certain meetings a lot easier. They're open to abuse, but so are conference calls and email. In fact, I find that conference calls tend to be even worse than in-person meetings because everyone has to dick around with calling into the system, figuring out who is on the line, trying to mute/unmute their phones, figuring out who is making all the noise, etc.
It's not even dumb that they announced this before they had desk space for these people. If they tried to buy the cube farms first then people would be criticizing HP for spending money on useless desk space. Also, investors might get word of new desk space and freak out over "secret plans for [something]". Obviously, HP doesn't expect everyone to stop telecommuting tomorrow. It's going to be phased in over some time.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Oh that's an easy problem to solve: ``HP Announces 80,000 Jobs To Be Eliminated''.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Doesn't HP make inkjet cartridges? Who would want to work from home making those things. Got to be messy work...
I've been telecommuting full time at home for over 7 years. Over half of our company is full time telecomuters spread across the USA. We are very successful at it and work very hard.
It is not like people imagine it. You wake up and get to work in the home office and stay disciplined. A lot to times you put in extra hours too. You get a lot more work done because you don't have office politics. Lots of phone calls, conference, video chat, and texting. If people don't see you fully engaged, producing, you will get fired. --- It is that simple. But you don't deal with traffic, hearing people backstabbing in adjacent cubicles, and all the bullshit that you wish you could get rid of to get your work done...
Sure you can take a break now and then, but if you get into goofing around people will be quick to notice just the same in this day in age. As long as you work hard and produce major results who cares. Studies have shown time and again that telecommuting produces greater results. Just don't do half and half. -- I don't think that works really well and leads to the stigma.
Meg and Carley are totally ignorant on full time telecommuting and the huge benefits. I think they are these hardcore career obsessed women who look down at family orientated women and say "heck no to those people telecommuting"... If they could they would probably ban maternity leave or kids to work as distractions. 20% of workers telecommute. Their mentality is that people are lazy by design an they need their people to be in cubicles.
In today's day in age unlike the 90's you've got instant messaging, facetime/skype, google video/chat... Most EDA tools can be local and licensed via a VPN license server.... I've been in countless meetings where we video collaborated work in real-time seamlessly. You don't need an office anymore for many types of industries. We would do complex engineering design online all the time.
It is ironic they don't like telecommuting but they force many of their employees to full time collaborate via video chatting, email, text to all the other divisions around the world....
We are headed to a contract for hire employee world as employers try to find legal ways not to offer health benefits, or trim staff like we're JIT inventory. It just makes sense that knowledge work be telecommute. It is far more efficient, cheaper for the company, and greater results.
Since HP, Intel, etc are companies where 30% is office politics and fun and games (I happen to know personally) they would benefit significantly.
:-)
I wonder if it's possible to get lost in reorganizations and end up collecting a salary but not have to work.
Paying and not allowing you to work is not the same thing: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/new-york-teachers-paid-to_n_219336.html
The mt view facility went to google a couple years ago, if it's the one with the beautiful tree lined driveway through it. I walk it every weekend to get to the Stevens creek trail to the bay. Pretty sure it used to be an HP R&D campus. Across the street from Symantec.
Surely it's going to work. This is the cheapest way to get a lot of people to just resign without severance pay. Just like they suddenly decided to cancel *all* external hires in Europe about a 18 months ago, killing many profitable projects with that decision, in the end they will come up with a much leaner work force that is way more eager to keep their job than the oversized bureaucratic non-functioning organization they have had for many years. Either that, or they will go belly up. They could alternatively get their shit together and actually start managing, but that would require an effort and look bad towards shareholders because it would mean long term investments and not better quarterly results.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Usually, when a business is in deep trouble, the management starts removing perks of all kinds (even the ones that don't cost anything). When they get strict about office hours, take the funny posters down and push the dress code, update your resume, you're about to need it.
HP bought EDS 5 years 5 months ago. That's the firm my brother was happily telecommuting for, for years. I guess he was expecting this to happen eventually. After all, why else would government work be privatized and then bought and sold by the likes of Ross Perot and Meg Whitman? It was all part of the nefarious plan to contract to perform government work for less by avoiding the costs that the government customarily pays its employees. Its like union busting but on a larger scale, and NOW its payday for them! But please America, don't be so naive that you don't see the truth about corporate America and the state of the economy. Its all just smoke in mirrors, and they intend to lower their costs and increase their profits now that they have stolen the business from you citizens. So, isn't it about time we stopped these assholes?
Apparently they already found a partial solution to that problem last month.
Yeah, we've been told about it several weeks as a by-the-way kind of thing. My immediate group is spread apart. My manager is in another part of the state and most of my team are in other states. We won't work differently regardless if we work from home or in the office. Do I obey like a little puppy dog? I know what the difference is--waste more gas while stuck in traffic.
Of all the people that I know that have 'worked from home' none of them has ever worked from home. It's just a paid free day.
And that was just a lame excuse. She obviously had other motives for cancelling telecommuting as there is no need for a VPN for real work. SSH does not require a VPN. Nor do version control systems (git, bzr, svn). Nor do HTTPS for the intranet or IMAPS for the mail. Not even SIP or Skype for calls needs a VPN.
VPNs only add an extra layer of complexity and add little to nothing in return. That goes double for PPTP, which is garbage.
So regardless if her telecommuters were productive or unproductive, VPN use is an irelevant metric.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Well, Mark Hurd actually had recovered a lot of the ground HP lost when Fiorino sunk the company. But the board of directors were so used to having a complete loser running the company that as soon as they could pin something on him, they ran him out and replaced him with the biggest idiot they could find after a quick world-wide search. Then they felt comfy again, and when they realized that they hired a CEO that was possibly TOO terrible, they replaced him with the closest thing they could find to Carly Fiorino.
Perhaps more interesting is the memo that broke today from when HP was delisted fro the Dow Jones Industrial Average (having occurred last month):
"I hope that every HP employee took today's announcement personally," she said in the one-page internal memo on September 10. Calling HP's departure from the benchmark index it joined in 1997 a "blow to our brand," Whitman said the moved showed many people still harbored doubts about her turnaround plan. "We need to make every sale," she stressed in the memo, which was seen by Reuters. Whitman's urgency is easy to understand. Two years into what she has always described as a five-year effort, HP's sales and profits are still sliding and Wall Street is losing patience. The stock has fallen 17 percent in the past three months and is down more than half its value since 2010.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/08/us-hp-restructuring-analysis-idUSBRE9970XL20131008
So Whitman has a turnaround plan which is clearly failing. This kind of "employees need to get more intense" plea is usually one of the last gasps of a failing company, IMO. Also notes that one her major moves was to throw executives out of their offices and into an open cube farm. So "rearranging the deck chairs" is quite literally part of what she's doing.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
... and their need for "communication"....
Sure. I worked at a startup once where one junior scripter just stopped coming in. It was right after a bit of a reorg, so nobody was really sure who his boss was. He hadn't been there long and came in with a huge hiring spurt, so nobody missed him. What he was doing was so unimportant, nobody noticed the lack of output. We figured it out 3 months later- he hadn't signed up for direct deposit, so the paper checks piled up on his desk and was eventually noticed by our receptionist. If he had just been smart enough to have set up deposit he likely could have gotten checks until the buyout.
In the end I don't think he ever got paid for more than a month or so of that time- he claimed he put in a 2 week notice via email, he was already working somewhere with a better offer.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Actually, it started back when Yahoo ordered the same thing. Shit, it all goes south from here. I just wish these companies have concrete plans to turn their fortunes around, plans that actually require all workers to be in the office.
I just got the e-mail from Meg.
hmm, I was not aware I am still working at HP - I haven't been there for like 3 years...
The paycheck is still coming though - strange... maybe they have to fix the glitch...
IMNSHO prolonged telecommuting works for a very small percentage of workers. I have done telecommuting a lot and I know I get distracted by domestic issues. I also have witnessed other people loose themselves in telecommuting. Deteriorating rapport with co-workers and with management. Becoming unappreciated and therefore unproductive. Basically loosing the plot. All hazards in telecommuting.
If you have a clear task that requires your full attention, if your domestic situation enforces your dedication and if you are highly disciplined then it might work for you for a limited period. Eventually you will have to reconnect with people at business. And no, none of us is so exquisite to justify longer term telecommuting.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
... Each HP campus will have multiple phone booths to accomodate the expected influx of employees back to the area.
(Captcha for posting: "Inifinte", as in space, too funny)
oomer??! She is!! My first though when reading the headline was that this broad MUST be a baby boomer for requiring workers to come in just for face time. I was right. Idiot. Can't wait until our generation takes over.
HP clearly has too much empty real estate they can't sell so their accountants told them to use it all. Whether they have 80,000 seats open or not isn't the point - 'people will make do' typically 3 to an office.
HP clearly wants to throw as much US employment out the window as possible. What better way to do that when your staff quits on their own. No lawsuits no severance. And better yet America's Next Top Female Executive of the Ages, Marissa Meyer (All Hail and Amen: we're down to only 8 columns a day on her over at Henry Blodgett's Business Insider) did it already. So they won't even get much bad PR from it.
But importantly - HP has no earthly fucking clue what they are doing. And this is more of that. They were sitting around the Boardroom one day and one of them mentioned "Hey are there any companies out there we can buy for an absurd premium, fuck up and write off 90%?" Not hearing any good ideas, their response was "Well ok then let's fire our American workforce on the sly. We're run by a woman so how bad could the fallout possibly be?"
And off they went.
Management need to know what can be accomplished and how to deal with people and how to read people if they can't be reasoned with.
All of which require more ability in the manager than just measuring something and if the figure is up, you've succeeded.
Hence it's not done that way.
What I'd be wondering is why is my job value millions an hour but I'm getting paid 30?
I'd be wondering why some CEO gets millions because their "leadership" gets the company a billion but my job, which makes billions, apparently, gets me thousands.
In short, I'd be asking "Can't the CEO do this? They're paid the big money."
That's why the CEO pay is fucking huge: they're getting their money's worth, otherwise they'd have not hired them and gotten someone worth the money. It's a competitive market and there are millions who'd be willing to do the job. Hell, outsource it.
The problem is that there aren't many good CEOs but pay is based on there being plenty of them. Otherwise they'd have clauses that would reduce the CEO salary if they didn't actually, as they claim, get "the best" for that position.
Completing time sheets when you're spending less than your baseline 40 hours working can bring a person otherwise behaving ethically to begin employing creative justifications to explain how sitting in your underwear in a spare bedroom reading slashdot is billable to the project's marketing budget
Bah, this is just a sneaky way to start lay offs. They have 80 000 without a desk, what should they do?
Well, my company went to "Open Seating" cubes. You don't have an assigned seat. The desks that exist are oversubscribed 1.25 people to 1. If everyone were to show up to work the same day some people won't have a seat, but most of the time it works out. Some people have meetings or vacation or business travel and don't need a desk *cough*party line*cough*.
In order to facilitate this, my company has some "mobile desks", where if you're gone for >15 min you're supposed to pack all your stuff up so someone else could potentially sit there. There are also normal cubes, but there's no permanent storage for your family photos or books or notes.
I guess it's time to short some HP stock.
Funny how this sort of reasoning never seems to apply to outsourced work.
Sounds like an understatement.
Come into work, but there will not be parking available, and you will have to stand in the halls all days and share an power outlet with 50 other people (oh, and our internal network will be overloaded, so good luck collaborating with anyone else).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If your company tries this then just leave. This happened to a friend of mine; his company tried to crack down on telecommuters and they lost critical employees.
I am sick of being at the mercy of managerial whim and fashion.
everyone can attend more meetings - where all the real work gets done!
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
According to an article on the HP site! http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Telecommuting-Creates-Happier-and-More-Productive-Employees/ba-p/1834?jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_c-001_title_r0001
According to sources familiar with the company's operations, as many as 80,000 employees, and possibly more, were working from home in part because the company didn't have desks for them all within its own buildings."
I hear Alcatel-Lucent has some new space available!
"We're getting our fat, legacy ass kicked in virtually every market space, because we've failed to keep up. So instead of asking the hard questions, like 'Why the hell didn't we keep up with a changing market for printer, PC's, servers, etc.', we're just going to throw shit at the culture wall to see if anything sticks."
Maybe HP could sell its sorry ass back to Agilent, since the latter seems to be the only viable remnant of the dismemberment committed during Fiorina's Folly. That would give the current HP a way to gradually back out of what has become a commodity business and get back to innovating.
I wonder if either HP or Agilent has a Carly-faced dartboard or two lying around...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I would think HP having a CEO that's not a sexual depraved incompetent moron would help a lot more.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
In a scientific approach, decisions are made based on data. Where is the data supporting the conclusion that working at an office is more effective (in what specific ways) than home? A quick google shows some conflicting opinions, e.g., http://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastianbailey/2012/09/19/does-working-from-home-work/ , http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226888 , http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/working-from-home-vs-the-office.html?_r=0 . Thoughts?
This was announced several months ago.
Muffy is one stinking cunt - in fact the word is almost too good for her. More like an unwashed twat you can smell across the room.
Can't buy yourself a governorship so you go anyplace else you can be a megalomaniac and take buckets of money for it. Well, at least you're not stealing directly from the California taxpayers this time but you'll take tens of thousands of jobs as you screw this company into the ground just to make yourself another billion or two.
My best to you, Muff!
What company do you own? I'd like to know so I don't accidentally buy stock in it. Since you think your management style is so brilliant, so won't mind telling us, right?
It doesn't matter if you work form home and dial in to a virtual meeting or do so from the office. Unless you divide things up where one project is at one location only.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Similar experience for me.. When i telecommute i just get a lot more done, when i'm in the office i waste time and money on travel, spend half the day gossiping, or being distracted by someone else who wants to gossip, find myself unable to concentrate due to background noise and can't wait to leave and do so as early as i can, have to keep going out to buy drinks or lunch because theres not enough space in the shared fridge etc.
In terms of actual results, i can get a lot more done at home with no distractions and a ready supply of food and drink.
Lots of people spend all day "in the office" and "staring at their computer screen" but they're not working, they're on facebook, slashdot, playing games or something else. Just because someone's in an office doesn't mean they're working.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
My employees love me
Sure they do. I suspect they're also quite diplomatic - just until they find an escape route and run away, screaming.
Will ending telecommuting now be the sign of a C suite that is out of ideas? As far as I can tell, Mayer at Yahoo and Whitman at HP both are scrambling for ways to justify their enormous salaries. I guess the hail-mary strategy is end telecommuting and piss off the stars in the company.
Good luck with that strategy.
-ted
These key people are in demand across their industry. Watch as people jump ship. But then, if HP has lost its sense of direction, cutting staff, key or otherwise, might just be the point of this exercise.
Have gnu, will travel.
Any reasonable person knows that whether or not telecommuting actually works depends entirely on the employee, assuming the job is telecommutable.
One of the biggest reasons telecommuting fails at large companies like HP is that, while it may actually work and increase productivity among a select few employees, everyone else sees telecommuters as "privileged" people who are getting an unfair perk, and it leads to problems just about everywhere else.
As with anything that is seen as a "perk" by the masses, you either have to give it to everyone, or no one.
I own a small company and telecommuting not only works for us, but it saves our hide, especially in the winter when we frequently find we just can't get to the office even when we want to. The work can still get done.
Anyhoo... I can see where it would be problematic at a place like HP.
This is another case of weeding out slackers and making them work for a paycheck. Yahoo did it and I will bet more and more will decide the Office is a better place to monitor workers. Microsoft has a work at home policy but from my understanding you are required to attend meetings, you have to set reasonable project schedules. HP in my view does not have a internal problem with people as much as a product line nobody is buying? I spent a couple hours with Chat support trying to diagnose a Laser Printer. Very helpful in many ways but very frustrating that a six month old printer requires so much diagnostics. In the end it was a failed firmware install that apparently it did automatically. I have owned a couple HP PC's and two printers. Have had issues with every one of them.
ok, Bill and Dave, you heard her, get out of the garage and back into your cube!
Unlike most people at her organization, CEO hiring and firing policies ensure that she will be well-compensated no matter the outcome, so making a flashy change that brings attention to her management is more important than the results of that change.
Paid to fail.
Once our company forced us to stop telecommuting and come in to the office, it strongly incentivised turning off my remote devices (work pager, work cell-phone, work laptop, &c.) once I got home. If I'm spending two extra hours each day (10 hours a week) just commuting, that's enough of a commitment.
-Bob-
I have a crazy idea; how about not making garbage?
Maybe that'll add a bit of value to the company. Maybe devoting resources to the people that, I don't know, create everything you sell would work out OK. Perhaps if you left them the fuck alone to work in whichever way suited them best would benefit you and them.
Nah. It'll never work. Start the layoffs!
Because nothing improves morale like being stuck in traffic for 30-60 minutes each direction so you can sit in a low walled cubicle with your over-cologned and over-perfumed coworkers trying not to listen to them think out loud for most of 8 hours. And in this case, even the dehumanizing cubicle might be too much for employees to ask for.
Well, they just removed a big reason for employees to NOT be looking for another job. Now, if they want to downsize, that's one thing but this way what you get is downsizing via exodus of your best employees. On the other hand, what you end up left with is all of the most desperate employees which you can then proceed to abuse with impunity. But that kind of work atmosphere is why Steve Ballmer is out of a job. Hopefully there's a chair-throwing range nearby that Meg can use to get up to speed...
What needs to be done is get rid of this crappy woman CEO and get a man in there that knows what the hell he is doing. Seem's to me like HP has been going downhill ever since they started having women CEO's that had no fucking clue and this one certainly doesn't.
How can a blanket policy like this work for a company of their size and business and geographic diversity? Some divisions/offices will see some improved productivity while others will have destructive interference. Good luck breaking even on this. OTOH, if they want to trim headcount then mission accomplished.
...to be treated as such:. It's worse than that. After once being treated as an expendable asset, the smart ones internalize the lesson that it's "just a job no matter where you go" and the lack of investment carries over to subsequent employers. Ultimately the entire workforce becomes tainted by the shitty HR policies in use today.
HEY! HEY! They gave the TouchPad a whole six weeks to unseat the iPad!
What do women CEO's have against telecommuting?
That's the great thing about a free market. You don't have to hire me, and I'm by no means obligated to work for you. And I guess I may speak for the both of us when I say that we're both very happy about that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is reversible. I've been at companies where I was treated as valuable and non-expendable, and companies where I was an expendable asset. Guess who got the extra effort when needed.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm sure she won't mind ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
On the other hand, I clearly see the advantages of being in the same room with people when communicating with them. Face to face is far faster and more effective than any other form. You can just turn around in your chair and ask Bob something.
I'm not anti-telecommuting, but for *creative* work in particular nothing beats face to face.
expandfairuse.org
I work at a Fortune 100 company, and we are well along in converting our spaces to more collaborative, open space. While we are encouraged to work at home if compatible with our purpose and function, the goal here is to maximize use of the real estate. Fair enough.
I see HP making this announcement for two reasons:
1. Advance notice for those who will not convert to in-office workers. Let them find other opportunities.
2. Fewer workers means less real estate, and of course voluntary layoffs.
Good plan. HP could use some vitality, and you can't easily get that with workers at home. Not easily.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
HP's stock was on the slide down, and has continued to since she took over.
Further, "In May 2013, Bloomberg L.P. named Whitman "Most Underachieving CEO" among big-company CEOs whose stocks have turned in the worst numbers relative to the broader market since the beginning of each CEO's tenure. HP's stock led the list by underperforming by 30 percentage points since Whitman took the job"
Palo Alto has always been HP's headquarters and it is still there, as is HP Labs.
I don't have to "guess". And it is reversible ... but some large percentage of the workforce is always going to be going to the next gig with a bad taste in their mouth from their latest stint as a corporate condom.
Somehow I'm pretty certain they know they don't have the capacities. What they hope for is that enough people realize that they're better off leaving rather than commuting to work every day because it's simply unfeasible for them to do so.
The rest will probably be crammed into the space 'til enough of them are fed up with literally sitting on top of each other to quit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Right, and this is a well known fact: as soon as a new CEO takes over, the previous problems at the company instantly cease and the stock price shoots up without any intervention.
Turning around the damage that Leo Apothiker and Mark Hurd inflicted is not something anyone could manage in 6 months. Meg Whitman has been extremely up front about that. Analysts like Bloomberg are retards who care about quarterly profits at the expense of long term sustainability.
Here's a slightly more balanced story: she's managed to put a floor under it, and now HP can start to rebuild. That takes time.
That's what they are counting on...it's a passive/aggressive move to claim ideological territory internally and silence critics.
IMHO both Yahoo and HP did this precisely b/c it reduces staff. Yes it is monumentally stupid to do this, but really is it any more 'stupid' than the idea itself?
Marissa Meyer and Meg Whitman are sort of the gender-flip Zuckerberg and Gates, IMHO...
different management styles but they share the "bottleneck features to control" philosophy to everything they do in biz...
Thank you Dave Raggett
All this is going to do is make it more difficult for them to hire quality people. If you have trouble with telecommuting you're probably not doing it right. There is no reason why you can't be just as connected to everyone when you're at home as when you're in the office. In the age of Skype group calling, there is just no reason it can't work unless you do manual labor or have to work directly on a physical product.
If this is what she wants - noisy cube areas, loss of productivity - give it to them - ^2
why else would government work be privatized and then bought and sold by the likes of Ross Perot and Meg Whitman?
Meg Whitman was not even employed by HP at the time of the EDS deal.
I'm amused by the number of posts on this thread who say things like "Meg Whitman is a petty tyrant with no ideas", with no stories or evidence to back it up, and many of those are modded up to +4, +5. Some conflate Whitman with Carly Fiorina, who is ***NEWSFLASH!*** a completely diffierent person from Whitman!
Interesting, insightful, really? I don't see it. I suspect it's a male bias against women in positions of power.
So Meg wants everyone to traipse on in from their homes to the cube farms which are noisy, crowded, and as such, on the verge of constant chaos. I know. I've been there.
as Useless as Democrats in California thought she would be. Got a problem? Lay the burden on the creative people who do the work. Let THEM suffer for your incredible lack of knowledge and skills.
BWHAHAHAAH!
I LOVE the smell of Capitalism In The Morning...It Smells Like Failure!!
Yahoo, now HP, all companies that used to be Something, and now rendered irrelevant by smarter competitors...
This is the result of panic before death... switching to 19th century strategy (workers have to come to the plant), instead of 21st century - hire smart productive workers who perform because they are motivated and smart , not because they are forced to come to the factory floor....
This is an indicator of management's desperation...
I'm so glad Meg Whitman was not elected as CA Governor (not that she ever had the chance)...
At least now she is limit to messing one a single company, instead of a the whole state...