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IBM: Remote Working Is Great! (For Everyone Except Us) (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: IBM, the company that just weeks ago said it was doing away with its work-from-home policy, is now preaching the benefits of telecommuting to customers. Big Blue's Smarter Workforce Group says a recent panel it hosted at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference concluded that customers who work remotely are "more engaged, have stronger trust in leadership and much stronger intention to stay. These findings mirror what an IBM Smarter Workforce Institute study found," the group wrote. "Challenging the modern myths of remote working shares employee research revealing that remote workers are highly engaged, more likely to consider their workplaces as innovative, happier about their job prospects and less stressed than their more traditional, office-bound colleagues." This is posted without any apparent sense of irony, as IBM said just weeks ago that remote workers were not part of its "recipe for success" and could no longer be permitted to work anywhere other than its six regional offices in various techie hubs around the US.
I never had trouble finding a job as a programmer until I started looking for remote work.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So what about all the remote Indian workers?
...when you know the real reason for removing their work-from-home policy and asking that everyone go to physical IBM offices.
They're not doing away with employees working remotely because they don't believe in it, they're doing away with it to encourage their oldest employees to retire or quit. Possibly also to weed out some employees who weren't really doing any work, which happens plenty with any job that offers telecommuting.
Once their oldest employees who aren't willing to relocate or move to keep their job quit, they'll offer telecommuting to their employees again.
By requiring that workers move to hub cities such as San Francisco, Austin, or New York, IBM could both rid itself of older workers and make the jobs more appealing to younger, lower-salaried professionals...
Coincidentally, an internal IBM video distributed to staff, and seen by The Register, advocates working in an office. Funnily enough, it features a lot of young folks...
Not hypocritical, but sneaky and dishonest?
Won't find me practicing what I'm preaching
Won't find me making no sacrifice
Story about IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty: At IBM's annual meeting last week, shareholders agreed with a proposal to increase her salary more than 60 percent to $33 million. (May 5, 2017)
From the story:
Her $33 million paycheck this year puts her ahead of tech CEOs like Microsoft's Satya Nadella ($18 million), who is successfully steering the company back towards growth, as well as leaders at fast-growing tech giants like Alphabet's Larry Page ($1), Apple's Tim Cook ($9 million) and Amazon's Jeff Bezos ($2 million).
Rometty has presided over 20 straight quarters of declining revenue growth.
Since she became CEO in January 2012, revenue has declined more than 26 percent on a trailing 12-month basis compared to the year before she took over, and net income has fallen nearly 27 percent.
Do as we say, not as we do. Because we have some great software to sell your telecommuting workforce.
During my time at Big Blue, we asked to be allowed to work from home one day per week. We were told that if we were saying our jobs could be done from any location that we needed to keep in mind that our jobs could be done from ANY location. At that point our entire team agreed that our jobs required us being at our desk 5-7 days a week. Go Big Blue!
Do what I say, not what I do!
Donald?
They're cheap.
If they TRULY wanted to lower salary requirements, they should move to Smallville, KS. I heard it was a super place to live :)
. . . they spent the last decade closing smaller sites world-wide, and consolidating everything in giga-sites. Part of this action was changing the office space into "e-workplaces" or "flexible offices". This basically meant tearing out the cubicle dividers, leaving a big full-floor room filled with just empty desks.
Employees get a locker room type closet with a trolley suitcase like thingy to stash all their junk that workers usually leave on their desks. IBM employees are not allowed to leave any items on the desk, since it is not their desk. Every morning they play "musical chairs" and everyone tries to grab a desk in a good position. If you are a programmer and need to concentrate in silence . . . and a salesperson sits down next to you doing "LOC = Lines Of Calls" instead of "LOC = Lines Of Code" like you . . . well, that is just tough shit for you.
IBM managers know that this is a stupid idea, but the goal was to save money, and that trumps everything. So they tried to sweeten the deal a bit by letting folks work at home. Basically, IBM has outsourced its office space building services to its employees. Well, guess what . . . if you can't at least put a picture of your wife and kids on your desk . . . you don't get "attached" to your "place of work". You also don't feel very much attached to the company either . . . so guess what that does to turnover rates.
So now, IBM wants to lure its employees back to work at IBM locations. But too many don't even have an office to go back to. If IBM wants to haul them back in, all they need to do is give their employees real offices to go back to.
These IBM e-places are just as pleasant to visit as a trip to Dachau: very loud, greying chipped concrete colored paint, rickety desks and chairs that make IKEA furniture look like luxury items.
Of course, they can always threaten to fire the employees, if they don't come back. Which is probably going to happen, since even Warren Buffet threw in the towel, and declared IBM to be a basket case. They desperately need another Lou Gerstner, to turn them back around again.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
IBM is no doubt just doing this in America and maybe Europe. They are hoping to gut the western employees. That is why I no longer even consider an IBM product or service.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"AMERIKA" hmmm well that gives one perspective no?
And this is why IBM has had 20 straight quarters of decline. From a prestigous and championed American employer to a run of the mill outsourcing company. Ginni Rometty is worthless and needs to go.
Oh, and Watson is just a marketing term used to sell overpromising and underdelivering half-baked AI.
If your goal is employee retention and attracting talent, then flexibility on remote work is a valuable perk. This is pretty much the entirety of what is being said, that the *employees* like being able to work remote (which of *course* we do, we like more options)
If your goal is assuring your team is the most effective, and you have little to no concern about labor shortage or retention, then an employee who can work in the office at least *some* of the time is invaluable.
Doing meetings remote can work ok, but it still pales in comparison in having everyone sitting in the same room. Even if you aren't *explicitly* marking some time as collaborative, the ability to turn your head and speak is great.
Being videoconferenced in during the whole day is just too bizarre and seemingly obtrusive. A text chat is suitably unobtrusive, but can drag on. Also if you see someone, you get a sense whether they are really busy or maybe they have some time to help out.
The truth is a balance is best, some home time for a comfortable working environment and at least for *some*, fewer distractions than at work. Some time at work for collaboration, and for *some*, fewer distractions than at home.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Typical big corporation. Probably a couple big paying customers complained so they decided to capitulate.
The same thing has happened in my office. We had work from home policy. One customer visited the office and said "how can you get anything done with no one here". The policy was reversed. No consideration for the benefits of work from home or justification that we got at least as much done (if not more). Customer says!
Tripping over dimes to pick up nickels.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
These are folks leaving IBM. And they are all fed up with IBM. They want out. It seems that maybe IBM has some form of hold on these folks because they say very little about IBM as a company. They usually say they are looking for something outside of IBM.
I had a negative reaction to that, also. Maybe Nadella is merely not as destructive as Steve Ballmer. Ballmer was rated the worst CEO in the United States.
Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today." Another quote: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value -- and jobs." (May 12, 2012)
I worked at IBM for about four years from 2000-2004. I have friends that just left about a year ago. They had begun the India-shift at that time already, but didn't have any W@H policy. The key thing to understand about IBM is that it's like a small city. They have more than 300,000 employees world wide. Like all cities there are good and bad parts of town. You work at Watson? Okay that's upscale. You work for IBM Global Services as a NOC engineer, sysadmin, or Java dev? That's the slums. If you work for IBM "true blue" you'd probably have an easier time W@H in the past than a red-headed stepchild working at IBM Global Services. The clients in IBM GS are the table pounding types and mostly in financial industries. They'd just have to complain to the sales reps that they heard a dog in the background of a con-call and W@H ends for everyone. I saw incidents occur like that while at IBM. You can also bet your ass that the Ph.D researchers at Watson who have any W@H privs are keeping them. IBM was always scared shitless to upset that apple cart. When I used to do security scans at IBM, those guys would always get a pass, no matter what. Bottom line: it's where you are at in IBM that will ultimately matter, I promise.
If you can do the job from home, then so can a team in India working for 1/10 the price. Remote working is a job killer, avoid at all costs.
you scratch mine. You know they're all on each other's boards, right? Why American is so adverse to recognizing their true ruling class is beyond me. Instead we waste our time worrying about "Big Government" and ignore the biggest government in the world: The Mega Corps.
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I worked for IBM for 4 years, they are a bunch of hypocrites. They tell their customers one thing then do something else. Their infrastructure is so shitty nothing works and they have the gall to try to advise other companies on how to run. One of the biggest hypocrisies is the fact that they say they support LGBT but have a major campus in Raleigh, NC and say they obey all local laws such as the discriminatory bathroom law. They are run by a bunch of sales weasels that will say anything to get that dollar and make their quarterly bonuses but don't give a shit about their customers once they have that sale. And they couldn't care less about their employees, they actually think management does real work when all they do is babysit pissed off customers. Managers get promotions and raises all the time but the real workers get diddly squat! I would never recommend working at IBM to anyone!
Working for big blue some commenters are quite right if you add "in pockets" or areas like we add in bed on fortune cookies. It's so big and so many divisions. We have some strong NA people and they care, but a lot of upside down pyramid and thin investment into a lot of things. But I work remotely and unless in services options are restricted now. But even though I might need to change jobs or cities eventually there are areas where the remote spread combined with poor tools and processes and poor management or too over extended management and too lean on funds is a Stiffler. Obviously like we humans do, they went with the simplest to understand solution to the multi faceted issue. FYI anyone in PHX looking for a top performer let me know ;)