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IBM, Remote-Work Pioneer, is Calling Thousands Of Employees Back To the Office (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Less than a year into her tenure as IBM's chief marketing officer, Michelle Peluso prepared to make an announcement that she knew would excite some of her 5,500 new employees, but also, inevitably, inspire resignation notices from others. In a video message, Peluso explained the "only one recipe I know for success." Its ingredients included great people, the right tools, a mission, analysis of results, and one more thing: "really creative and inspiring locations." IBM had decided to "co-locate" the US marketing department, about 2,600 people, which meant that all teams would now work together, "shoulder to shoulder," from one of six different locations -- Atlanta, Raleigh, Austin, Boston, San Francisco, and New York. Employees who worked primarily from home would be required to commute, and employees who worked remotely or from an office that was not on the list (or an office that was on the list, but different than the one to which their teams had been assigned) would be required to either move or look for another job. Similar announcements had already been made in other departments, and more would be made in the future. At IBM, which has embraced remote work for decades, a relatively large proportion of employees work outside of central hubs. (By 2009, when remote work was still, for most, a novelty, 40% of IBM's 386,000 global employees already worked at home). [...] "When you're playing phone tag with someone is quite different than when you're sitting next to someone and can pop up behind them and ask them a question," Peluso says. Not all IBM employees see it that way.
This is exactly how Reddit did it. Eliminate WFH employees, eliminate everyone that doesn't want to or can't physically relocate, and you've downsized while making it seem like it was the departing employees choice to leave.
Maybe they just figured out how to get rid of a bunch of employees without having to pay severances or unemployment.
Exactly.
Everyone has their phone in their pocket. As someone who tele-works to a job across the country, if Michelle Peluso feels like she's "playing phone tag" with people, it's because they don't want to talk to her.
"I sacrificed my family life to get where I am. Why does SHE get to work from home and pick up her kids?" Sounds familiar
I work in consulting and a lot of my employees work as contractors. I meet with the client managers for feedback regularly and I get maximum complaints about our female employees taking days off or WFH to deal with school, sickness etc. Funny thing its mostly the female Client managers complaining not the males. Maybe the males expect women to be taking time off to deal with kid issues. But its wierd that its always women complaining about other women taking time off to deal with kids. I have even had one say "I dont take time off when my kid is sick . Why does your contractor take a half day to go watch a recital?"
**Life is too short to be serious**
This, exactly. They are trying to cheat their employees out of unemployment benefits, and if I were telecommuting and unable to relocate, I would refuse to accept the terms and I would not hand in my resignation either. I would make them fire me and let their HR department know that I expected unemployment and a severance package as if I were laid off. If they try to withhold unemployment benefits, I would get a lawyer and start a class action for unemployment benefits, legal fees and punitive damages for bad faith and contact my state AG to start an investigation.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
I've been working from home for a few years now, and I even turn off the damned IM products they have tried thrusting upon us...latest one, Lync.
I can't get a damned thing done without someone trying to annoy me on lync, and it usually is NOT something that is a priority item.
I will fire it up and join a meeting when needed, or desktop sharing is absolutely required, but for 99% of my time, I do not need it and it is detrimental to my work and concentration.
Fortunately, I've been around long enough where no one really presses me on it like they do others...but I find email to be best way to work, it is asynchronous, and AND...I think it leaves a much better paper trail for CYA when needed at future times.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
They did the same thing at the last company I worked for, made all the remote workers start reporting to the nearest office. The company only had a couple of offices in the US, so many of the sales and marketing people worked remotely. The net effect was that all of the good sales and marketing people who had long standing relationships with our customers left the company, taking their knowledge and customer relationships with them, a number ended up working for our competition. Rather than improve efficiency, this policy alienated our customers, got rid of our best sales performers, and hastened the demise of the company.
You... really aren't understanding the mindset of the MBA schools. Or perhaps you are and yet you hold out hope in the face of all contrary evidence.
I just watched a documentary-style report on an MBA school. Their idea was to hire ex-military people who have set up "retreats", put the MBA students into the retreat, stress them out like crazy and build something while they are stressed out. The kicker was, the ex-military hosts deliberately planted someone in the MBA group as a sh*t disturber. Seriously, the whole point of the plant was to sow confusion, discord, and negativity. Not so much as to reveal their role as a plant, only enough to disturb group dynamics.
The theory, such as it was, was to challenge the groups with a team member whose mindset wasn't that of a team player. Then see how the group responded, and see if any leaders emerged.
MBA schools are built around the idea of a school of piranhas. The biggest, meanest, baddest piranha wins, and they want that. Team membership is a bit of a sham to get the group to line up behind such leaders. All the rest of the team mantra is mainly window dressing to get compliant behavior from the team members.
When you're given about 5 months to move, *while* the economy is down, and cannot afford to wait more until it goes back up because you need the money right now to pay a premium for the new one in a place where you have to wait several months to get a contractor due to the huge influx of people (and pay more to those contractors than you would under normal conditions), things get way outside optimal. You're basically stepping from the 4th-sigma of the left tail of the Gaussian distribution directly to the 4th-sigma of the right tail. So, yeah, you lose money, the hope being you lose less than you would otherwise.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.