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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."
Well as long as HP doesn't try to sell telecommuting to other companies because they obviously don't know how to do it http://www8.hp.com/h20621/video-gallery/us/en/customer-care/computing-and-mobile-devices/network-and-internet/1251324810001/hp-home-office-telecommuting-equipment-basics/video/.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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 worked on a contract at a major telco in the U.S. that had a lot of telecommuting. They were implementing new ordering, billing, provisioning... systems. They had so many issues during that time, mostly because the left hand never knew what the right hand was doing. My impression was it was caused by people not being in the same office or campus. I worked on a similar project at another telco that didn't telecommute and things went far smoother. People were able to actually walk to someone else's desk and confer. And face to face meetings always had the result of better communicating ideas than in chat windows and even phone calls. It also helped blow walls in the silos between teams when you could go to the area where the other team sat. Or call meetings with people in the same room. Telecommuting is nice for the workers, and I too like it, but is absolute shit for creating quality work in a timely manner. Slag at this all you want, but that is my perspective from two projects implementing the same system using two different management policies: telecommuting versus 'no telecommuting'. And 'no telecommuting' produced better work.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
[Worker]" Sure, no problem, I'll drive in which should take 2 hours so I don't telecommute."
I did that once (I lived 90 minutes' drive away)... it was the first and last time they ever thought a physical presence in a 'war room' to fix a gimped VM was that important to have.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as
It's my experience that other people most certianly do judge me (and probably you) by looks, including dress. There was one period early in my career where I decided to dress as casually as I could get away with. I also grew my hair down into a ponytail. Slowly while this was going on, somehow at work my perception changed from a bright young go-getter to a useless slacker.
When things got the worst for me career-wise, I decided to physically clean up. After all, its trivial to do. Certianly much easier than actually changing my attitude, right? So I started dressing up. One day at work I just started showing up in dress slacks and shoes, tie and jacket. breifcase instead of backpack. I cut the ponytail off.
It wasn't as obvious during the slow transformation, but the sudden change back was dramatic. Overnight I was right back to being a praised go-getter. Not only that, but I noticed that salespeople in stores would talk to me again, as would panhandlers. When I was ponytail guy, car salemen in patrticular would just act like I didn't exist. Even if I was there to buy something.
If you haven't tried it yourself, you'd be absolutely amazed how much other people's perception of you is based on looks. The thing is, dress and hairstyle are pretty much entirely in your control. You may have a style of each you prefer, but from a strict economic perspective, if you don't do both to maximize your preception at work, you aren't hurting anyone but yourself. So that's what the value of ties is.
The whole experience also left me with a new appreciation for folks with ethnic, weight, or general attractivness issues. While I was being studiously ignored by car salesmen until I left, there was a black guy on the lot getting the same treatment. I could go home and cut off my pony-tail. What could he do?