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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."
It's not exactly the first time this type of thing has been done. It's a page out of the HR version of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
PetroCanada, for instance, bounced its offices back and forth between Toronto and Calgary a few times (back in the 80s or 90s). Lots of people tried to hang on and lost their shirts on moving expenses because the housing markets happened to be going the opposite way of the moves.
Companies will sometimes hire an 'axe man' who gives them advice on the best way to get employees to leave for the least possible expense to the corporation. Forcing them to choose between moving and quitting is not uncommon.
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!