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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."
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).
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.
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.
Yeah, if you're going to do something like this, you need to give your developers something to believe in, a reason to work for the company. Otherwise your developers will see it and find another place to work.
And honestly, it's not clear at all that HP has anything to believe in. If you say, "During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck," you better have an actual way to turn the company around.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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
yeah.. during the planning stage for the "shift".. wtf do you need people sitting in the office unsure of what they should be doing?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
Please. Carly killed it over a decade ago.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
The HP Way died on a dark winter's day in 1999, when Bill Hewlett experienced a failure of willpower reminiscent of the fall of Isildur, and failed to drown Carly Fiorina in his swimming pool.
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.
Just when I finally got rid of all my pants.
Oh, so you still think you work for HP?
Ummm, how about doing what they were doing at home, except at the office?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.
Apropos which, I found this series of posts fascinating reading.
Sample:
[William H. Whyte, author of The Organization Man] saw signs that in the struggle for dominance between the Sociopaths (whom he admired as the ones actually making the organization effective despite itself) and the middle-management Organization Man, the latter was winning. He was wrong, but not in the way you’d think. The Sociopaths defeated the Organization Men and turned them into The Clueless not by reforming the organization, but by creating a meta-culture of Darwinism in the economy: one based on job-hopping, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, cataclysmic reorganizations, outsourcing, unforgiving start-up ecosystems, and brutal corporate raiding. In this terrifying meta-world of the Titans, the Organization Man became the Clueless Man. Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. The result is the modern creative-destructive life cycle of the firm [emphasis added]
Six posts in the series, each shedding much light on modern corporate dynamics. TL;DR version is "the executive class has gone feral."
Also worth reading is another post of Venkat's, "You are not an artisan".
Those deck chairs aren't going to move themselves...
Feeding their dog? Walking around in their underwear? Reading Slashdot?
Don't that's going to cut it at the office. :)
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If that's what you tell me for putting my resources at the company's disposal, for saving them money by providing my own "office" along with my own office supplies and blur the line between work time and leisure time enough that a call at 10pm usually starts with "oh good, I see you're still logged in...", expect my 2 weeks notice in the reply.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, if you're going to do something like this, you need to give your developers something to believe in, a reason to work for the company. Otherwise your developers will see it and find another place to work.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was exactly what they are after. Removing existing perks (such as working from home) is a good way to increase the rate of natural attrition. It is a standard management technique: basically you annoy your staff so that they find jobs elsewhere, and you don't replace them. If your company was in enough trouble that you are going to need a round of redundancies, doing this means that you save a money by not having to pay those employees out, as they are the ones that resigned.
My objection to this technique has always been that by doing this, you essentially lose the people that have skills and can get jobs, and keep the people who don't have skills and can't get jobs, weakening your company. I'd generally rather choose who to make redundant, even if it costs a bit more, and keep the people who I know are actually productive around.
But bean-counters rarely seem to have the capacity to understand that argument.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
More importantly....
It's 2:00AM, some "very important server" has just gone down.
[Pointy Headed Management]"We have to get this server working or we'll lose millions an hour"
[Worker]" Sure, no problem, I'll drive in which should take 2 hours so I don't telecommute."
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 had to snicker at that "unite and inspire them to achieve higher levels of excellence" line. Not only because it's the typical management bullshit crammed into a single line, but because I can just see how "inspired" the people will "unite".
Considering that HP has by no means that amount of space necessary to accommodate the amount of people, it will be a tad bit ... well, let's say crammed. And somehow the image of how three people crammed into a cubicle try to achieve any level of operational excellence makes me snicker... though I can see how they have to be quite innovative to find a way to get ANY work done in such a setup.
And yes, I'm pretty sure it will unite them. In their hatred towards their company, at least.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
[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?
Lee Iacocca said a lot of great things. Unfortunately almost all of them are bullshit. A more accurate quote would go more like, "I come on board for an inflated salary, get the government to bail my company out, loot the employees' pension fund, take credit for other people's ideas, then cash in my stock options and sell a work of complete fiction that I call my autobiography." My uncle retired from thirty-some years at Chrysler and didn't have enough hours in a day to bad talk Iacocca. I think the thing that most annoyed him was Iacocca taking credit for saving the company by inventing the minivan. The initial version of Chrysler's copy of the Toyota minivan was already at the Proving Grounds being tested when Iacocca came on board, he just delayed the project by insisting on cosmetic changes. Jimmy Carter saved Chrysler, by declaring that the Federal government would only by Chrysler cars for the next ten years and going ahead with the production of the M1 Abrams tank.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
:-)
It's 2:00AM, some "very important server" has just gone down.
[Pointy Headed Management]"We have to get this server working or we'll lose millions an hour"
To which I would reply: "I thought you moved all those jobs it India so that we could have a 'Follow the Sun' model and none of us would have to woken out of a sound sleep, Bangalor will take care of it. Well, what happend to that plan?"
Another day closer to redwood heaven
My objection to this technique has always been that by doing this, you essentially lose the people that have skills and can get jobs, and keep the people who don't have skills and can't get jobs, weakening your company. I'd generally rather choose who to make redundant, even if it costs a bit more, and keep the people who I know are actually productive around.
Correct, mostly. I have seen this happen in a number of companies I have worked out, The mgr starts a round of layoff, either by laying people off of annoying workers until they quit, what also happens is that the smart, talented workers they want to keep read the writing on the wall and leave. The mgt tries to compensate by ramping up the off shore offices but soon discover that it's damn near impossible and really expensive to replace the good people who walked out.
Rinse then repeat.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
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?
This is a well known scenario called the dead sea effect.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Nissan motor company. But they also had a CEO that could execute. With a katana if necessary.
But bean-counters rarely seem to have the capacity to understand that argument.
Most companies cannot really evaluate people. They don't know the value of the people they employ. Bonus are given based on the success of the project you are working on and external sign of failure of you direct colleague. Deep down, bean counter know that. They know that if they are going to cherry-pick people, at best they will fire random people.
Also, when you pay executive hundred of times the salary of regular employee, at some point you start to believe they are worth it. With a team of rockstars like that, why would you care about relative performance of cheapo employee ?
Windows 8, the flop that made WinME look popular, was built because Ballmer saw in the financial times that Apple was the richest company and totally flipped his shit, THAT is how it got built. BTW I love how the apologists claim its "innovation" when IRL all they did was take the same strategy they had for a decade and flip it 180, instead of sticking teeny tiny desktops onto smartphones they took a UI designed for a teeny tiny cellphone and stuck it on a 30 inch high def non touch desktop....brilliant. About as "innovative" as sticking bicycle handlebars on a pickup and its gone over about as well.
As for HP? if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing i don't care where they work, the company is still toast. When you look at the amount of money pissed down the drain in the past half dozen years there the fact that their stock isn't penny ante just shows how little connect between wall Street and real life their is, because it seems their "strategy" is "Buy something for WAAAY too much money, not have a clue WTF to do with it, take a bath, write it down, rinse and repeat".
At the end of the day none of these PC companies can change the reality which is thus...once AMD and Intel went from MHz wars to Core wars computers went from "good enough" to insanely powered with so many spare cycles that for the average Joe its like using a top fuel dragster to go to the store so there simply isn't a need to replace them before they break anymore. Even my gaming customers are on 3 and 4 year old chips because the quad and hexacores are just insanely overpowered and on the laptop front those C2Ds and Turion X2s do everything Joe average wants to do on a laptop.
So they can stick all their employees in an underground lair for all the good it will do, PCs have become appliances and like the washer and dryer just aren't getting replaced until they die. There really isn't anything any of them can do and until some new way of programming comes out that can make writing programs for multicores that will scale with cores as easy as writing for a single core? Then the OEMs are just gonna keep having shitty quarters. I predict the same will be happening to phones and pads within the next 2 years as you already have Nvidia up to pentacores and Samsung up to hexacores so just like PCs it'll be a race to the bottom and once everybody who wants one has a multicore it'll be stagnant for them as well.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Move? I heard about a guy that throws them! Across the room! He is also free for hire now.
it's almost impossible to manage several employees remotely.
I honestly can't fathom how this can be the case. How hard is it to have basic metrics to balance against weekly status reports? I don't see how physical location does anything to create accountability for one's work output, and is no substitute for management.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Well, that's perfectly understandable. If her effect on the pool water quality was anything like what she did to HP, he'd have been stuck with 30000 gallons of toxic waste in his backyard.
Log in or piss off.
HP is also a consulting company. Perhaps they should work on new killer apps to use all those new CPU cycles and actually give people a reason to buy new computers. HP could get into 3D printing and mass market it.
HP needs R&D right now. Most companies cut it in 2008 and they need it badly at this point.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
This is the kind of decision-making that earns people of her class millions if not up-front, then at least in out-the-door compensation. Low-risk to her ass, while such a major-change seems both plausible and relatively do-able as she seems to be smart, with no concept or care for how things have actually been done up until now, and the people involved. Hell, Marissa Meyer at Yahoo already has enacted this thinking months ago; and not the freshest of ideas. Meg thinks her bosses on the board will appreciate such a decisive move, and also The Changes She Enacted. This piddly decision has CYA written all over it. It takes no measure into the talent that chooses to telecommute (using HP IP and modern-technology) into consideration, or their personal investments, and certainly stresses the workforce and pool of talent.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
expect my 2 weeks notice in the reply.
I'm sure they expect many 2 weeks notices. A move like this is probably a precursor to a mass layoff, unless of course they 'meet their numbers' in people who quit due to the new policies.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
She should have used this opportunity to say, "A lot of us are telecommuting nowadays, but our collaboration tools suck. Let's fix that." Instead, she resorted to the more archaic solution. And that is why they will fail. They need to look to the future, not the past.
if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing
I assure you that most CEO's indeed have a plan and have a very good idea about what they're doing. Except usually that plan has everything to do with manipulating the short term stock price and CEO bonus levels and nothing to do with the long term health of a corporation.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
While funny, it does bring up a serious note. Why are programmers and for that matter any cubicle jockey required to wear "business" clothes? Does a dress shirt and tie help you work?
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as one may treat one's free time. Given how many people spend their free time particularly passively, this can be a problem.
Wearing attire different for the time when one works for someone else than one wears for one's self can help reiterate to the person that professional time is just that, professional.
Certainly there are examples of this not holding true, as there are individuals that will act professionally in casual attire, and there are individuals that will act casually in professional attire, but it seems to hold that more people are professional when in professional attire than are professional when in casual attire.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
BS. Wearing a monkey suit might be good if you spend a lot of your time out and meeting business-persons. In the workplace, it's often uncomfortable and distracting.
Where I work, weather ranges from -30c to 30+c depending on the time of year. Wearing a suit is sweaty, uncomfortable, and frankly results in some personal odor issues for people who are prone to perspiration.
We also have people who bike/walk to work. They wear reasonable clothes for work, but they're also easy to change in/out of.
Suits make suits feel better, but they're not for everyone. While a Hawaiian shirt and a g-string aren't work appropriate, reasonably comfortable clothing is fine for most people. Starting a professional, respectful workplace starts with attitude, not clothes.
Six months down the line, when those people are in the unemployment line and have given up looking for work, it'll be "We need more H1B visas, we can't find enough workers!"
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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?