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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.
When you work on site, you are competing with your neighbor.
When you work remote, you are competing with the guy in Mumbai.
I've worked from home almost my entire 24 year career (about 20 years at home, 4 years doing in-office work). But, every WFH position I've had, including my current one, came out of a previous at-office work relationship, where I'd already established the trust with my superiors that I know what I'm doing, and can be productive without supervision.
If a company is just "blindly" hiring, they're going to pick someone who will work in-office every time, unless you have an extremely specialized skill set that's tough to find.
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!
. . . 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!
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.