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IBM is Telling Remote Workers To Get Back in the Office Or Leave (wsj.com)
For the last few years, IBM has built up a remote work program for its 380,000 employees. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that IBM is "quietly dismantling" this option, and has told its employees this week that they either need to work in the office or leave the company (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: IBM is giving thousands of its remote workers in the U.S. a choice this week: Abandon your home workspaces and relocate to a regional office -- or leave the company. The 105-year-old technology giant is quietly dismantling its popular decades-old remote work program to bring employees back into offices, a move it says will improve collaboration and accelerate the pace of work. The changes comes as IBM copes with 20 consecutive quarters of falling revenue and rising shareholder ire over Chief Executive Ginni Rometty's pay package. The company won't say how many of its 380,000 employees are affected by the policy change, which so far has been rolled out to its Watson division, software development, digital marketing, and design -- divisions that employ tens of thousands of workers. The shift is particularly surprising since the Armonk, N.Y., company has been among the business world's staunchest boosters of remote work, both for itself and its customers. IBM markets software and services for what it calls "the anytime, anywhere workforce," and its researchers have published numerous studies on the merits of remote work.
Rats fleeing BACK???
So, let's fuck with the regular employees. That'll fix it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
IBM can come up with as many pointless management changes as they like, but it won't alter the fact that this is a sinking company that does very, very, very little that is of any real use to anyone. Most of IBM's so-called activity is totally pointless and they've had a succession of clueless CEOs on exorbitant paypackets, none more so than the current brainless moron at the helm.
IBM, a giant corporation with big financial challenges, is addressing their labor cost issues by issuing a blanket proclamation that will remove mostly older, higher salaried employees from their workforce while simultaneously retaining and hiring in more younger, cheaper employees in the urban tech centers where their few remaining offices are located.
Expect the policy to continue until they start to hurt from the lack of experienced people to execute the little actual work that gets done in the corporation.
Call me back to the office once, shame on you.
Call me back to the office twice, shame on msmanishHD.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Revenue's down, so they want to increase expenses too? I don't get it.
Wasn't this information recently on Slashdot?
Not that redundancy can't be a good thing. But saving time is also good.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
the "soft layoff" is a coward ceo's last line of defense to "rightsize costs"
As if all the brains hadn't bled away from big blue a generation ago... Anyone left with the ability to work at an actual productive job will quit rather than move.
I quit!
Utter nonsense. None of these types of operations are centralized enough for this to matter. Even if you go into an IBM run facility, your entire team will be spread to the four corners of the earth. Even if you work with people in the same building, those people will be nowhere near you.
Working in large corporate outfits like this is still effectively telecommuting even if you have to drive into one of their offices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I presume that they have since realised that there are, in fact, real benefits to having a full team in a single location. And now that they have sacked so many staff, they now have the free space to actually implement the most sensible and efficient (for the company, not the employees) way of getting the most out of their people.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I have been interviewing a lot of folks from IBM lately and their work is getting outsourced to India and other countries that provide dirt cheap and mostly unqualified labor. And to boot these folks have to train their foreign replacements. This bringing folks back to the office is a move by IBM to get a lot of people to quit voluntarily. And they will and it will be their best and brightest, who will move on to the Google's and Amazon's of the world only to make those companies even stronger.
"The shift is particularly surprising because ... its researchers have published numerous studies on the merits of remote work."
I've always found that consultants say what their customers want to hear. Or maybe it's that their customers pay to hear what they want to hear. So, of course they have been endorsing working from home.
The hollowing out of IBM will continue until the C-suite suits cash in immediately prior to bankruptcy. If this sounds harsh, look at IBM's track record over the past 5 years - as their stock price has risen, customer and employee NPS has plummeted.
This is a good way to get rid of your lifer employees who've settled down into family life and are just coasting, relying on labor laws and the hefty cost of severance to keep their jobs. Call in to a meeting after dropping off the kids here, respond to some emails after picking up the kids there, everything off at 5. Meanwhile you have the productive employees at the office that come to kind of ignore and not expect anything from the wfh crowd. I've been a contractor at several large companies (cisco, yahoo, oracle) and I've seen it. Yes yes you have your rock star wfh employee here and there. But for the most part, the wfh folks might as well not even be on the team you wouldn't notice and everybody resents them because they make more money than them and don't have to come in and they don't do anything. So this sort of policy shift is a good way of getting rid of dead weight without having to pay severance because there's no way a remote coaster can convert to productive office monkey and they know it.
I have a radical idea to improve the company!! maybe stop selling everything you have to become a simple "government and big company" service provider (where you repack mostly open source tools with some in house tools)
yes, those pay big money, but those are only choosing IBM because of the name. New guys, companies, tech people now that IBM is expensive and do not have anything new to offer and bypass then and use open source directly without paying a fortune!
IBM have so many patents each year , yet IBM stopped producing anything... just start using the patents to improve the hardware, sell things that even the smaller companies want, sell things that even the end user wants
if you are a service company, you are just one more, that can be replaced in no time
Higuita
Ah the old Kavorkian layoff technique. Gets rid of the older expensive employees the easy way.
I guess someone just wants this to stay in the news churn. Probably for the best, big companies deserve most everything they get when they pull employee/consumer-hostile moves:
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Bil Gates and larry Ellison may be tools but they were "good" CEOs. As was Steve Jobs 2.0 ( 1.0 not so much, there was a reason he was fired ). So why are the women we hear about, Fiorina, Meyer, Rommety Whitman... all incompetent.
First they encouraged you to work from home while they covered costs like phone, internet, supplies.
Then they cut that support.
Then multiple times they have asked to move back (at my own expense) or look for other work.
I've been useful enough to get exceptions.
Will see how long that lasts. I know it won't last forever.
Oh wait...
Anything that makes the place really shitty to work in so they can jack up the attrition rate. So much cheaper than layoffs even if you end up with all the deadwood that can't find work elsewhere.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/03/21/169243/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-thousands-of-employees-back-to-the-office
Nothing to see here, just more of the same.
It is far past time to pass a law that limits CEOs pay to 10x the average pay of their employees in cash and the rest in company stocks that can only be sold 10% per year, requiring CEOs to focus on the long term health and viability of their company, not just short term gains...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
My theory is, the more that virtualization takes over and sites migrate their uber expensive AIX and HACMP high-availability architecture to RedHat and Oracle Linux, etc., the less relevancy IBM will have in any context.
In my field there are only a dwindling few Healthcare shops that still use Websphere and have to hire droves of offshore folks to maintain care and feeding of their ESQL WebSphere monstrosity - and when they learn they can do a lot better integration with newer, cheaper and more efficient tech? Maybe IBM will finally pass away into obscurity. It's funny, for such a big organization they completely suck at managing technical people.
Of course one giant healthcare entity that permeates the west coast and arizona that still uses Websphere using droves of offshore teams probably won't migrate because the consulting company they work with has too much of a vested interest to do anything efficiently. How does the consulting saying go? "Instead of offering a solution there's always money to be made in prolonging the problem!" :) But that's a different discussion for another time.
And this is spoken as someone who has been working with Healthcare IT for the last 25 years - and the last 8 have been 100% from home. And the people and sites I work with are smart enough to collaborate over webcams and shared electronic whiteboards. What's IBM's problem? Ohhh that's right. Whack the old people and jump on the Agile bandwagon! IB can then say, "See! We're relevant now!" Bwaaaahahahahaa!!
Personally I hope IBM and their soft-layoff, Agile touting bullshit flames out and dies a horrid, screaming death. I just feel bad about the employees that are between a rock and hard place having to move from their home office to warm a dinky cubical to "collaborate" with "SCRUM". Whatever. Every site I help migrate from expensive proprietary AIX to Linux managed via VSphere makes me giggle like a schoolgirl.
Never have a philosophy which supports a lack of courage
Enough said.
They should do what my employer did. Change to a "open office" floor plan and require 100% of the workers to be in the office 80% of the time and only provide enough desks for 50% of them. Do the same with parking and I guarantee they will have the attrition numbers they seek.
IBM is Telling Remote Workers To Get Back in the Office Or Leave
, You Bastards!
This is OLD news...
Will IBM continue installing the zippers?
Uh... IBM is hiring then?
If you chance the terms of employment, whether written or implied, most places would require a company to offer a severance package. It could get even worse for IBM. In Canada an employee could go along with the change in employment and then quit later and sue the company for the severance. If this is a way of doing stealth layoffs it's the dumbest way of doing it possible.
you don't need that many experienced people to keep an eye on the young'uns. Older people just can't work as hard, and like it or not age related cognitive decline is real.
Instead of trying to come up with excuses why older employees should work into their 60s+ we should be figuring out what to do with people as their productivity declines. That's a touchy subject though because the only real solution is income redistribution and nobody likes that...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
cause either my work is worth less than I'm costing you and I should leave or I'm bringing in profit and you should not even ask. But in any case, if you demand I stop working and accept new conditions, good luck doing my job as well as your own, Mr Executive.
My personal experience is that remote working improves performance. Reduces "noise" while working and reduces "communication" to a minimum. There are no "surprise meetings", and every meeting I have to attend has been planned in advance.
But then... IBM will probably know better.
See subject: I looked @ it as mgt. KNOWS (especially middle to lower ones) their jobs would be on the line IF they didn't do this.
* "All those chiefs, not enough PRODUCTIVE indians (feathers not dots)" as the saying goes - real 'smart' (not) getting rid of folks that ACTUALLY GET THE JOB DONE & "keep the blowhard bureaucrats" (this doesn't count actually TECHNICALLY PROFICIENT MGT. THOUGH who have "walked a mile in their boys' shoes" having done the job themselves (not mostly the case TO THIS VERY DAY & in my day circa 1994-2008 professionally? Almost NO MGT. QUALIFIED on that front in the computer sciences based field!)).
APK
P.S.=> Imo? IBM is dying... apk
In a lot of places I've worked (never for IBM, but know a lot of people who have...) this was done as a copycat HR thing ("Google and GE do this, so I'm going to propose it at the next board meeting" says the VP of HR.) -- or a cheap way to get rid of high-talent, high-salary workers.
The first thing is usually just a silly knee-jerk reaction, and is very similar to VPs of IT reading an airline magazine "article" about some buzzwordy technology and suddenly declaring that we're "all-in" on Technology X. The place I work for is very nice to work for job-wise, but often badly copies HR policies that don't really apply to our company. (Our new push to attract hip young Millenials at the expense of everyone else is a perfect example -- comically out of touch with reality and copied word for word from some business rag article about Google.)
The stealth layoff is more sinister. IBM is famous for offshoring every single job they can in recent years, and arbitrary HR policies like this are less likely to be tolerated by older, talented workers. We have a few fully remote workers, and they earn that privilege because they are _really_ good at what they do. I imagine IBM has a very similar situation, with a small cadre of old-timers who really know what's going on secretly directing the newbies behind the scenes. Older workers with families can't move as easily as some new graduate who can fit all their belongings in their car. Old-school IBM, where people had jobs for life, would have been a different story. Those days, if your company moved you for a new project, you moved because it was a good opportunity and it would increase your salary and/or presence within the company. Now, all employees are treated as disposable and knowledge counts for little.
I'm sure they have some people milking the work from home thing...you always will, and big companies really do build up a lot of excess staff. This happens a lot with companies that go on acquisition sprees, and people just hide out until the next big clean-out. But in my opinion this will force the few talented US-based workers at IBM out, and allow them to say "See? We can't find anyone willing to work here in the US -- prepare this division for relocation to Bangalore!"
IBM == I've Been Mistreated?
IBM == Is Badly Managed?
IBM == Ich Bin Mude. (German for "I am tired".)
IBM == Internal Bothersome Meddling?
IBM == Ich! Blah! Meh! ???
If they can't get rid of enough employees that way, there will be some office relocations to other cities. That's step two of the stealth layoff strategy.
The spastic twitch of a dying god.
... that have been assembled from around the world via telecommuting will now all relocate to one office somewhere. Which country gets the office, and which employees have to migrate to a new country?
"... current brainless moron at the helm."
Report: IBM's top exec pay package 'now worth $65 million'. Quote: "... IBM has posted declining revenues over the past five years under her leadership and last week reported declining revenue for the 20th consecutive quarter."
Could someone explain how CEOs get such high pay?
IBM == Is Brainless Moron?
IBM == Insufferably Bad Management?
Things change re H1B making it harder to replace local talent with cheaper offshore talent (not discussing talent levels, just $$)
So IBM says to U.S. remote workers 'get in the office or get out'; U.S. remote workers are not as cheap as offshore 'talent'.
Is IBM saying to offshore remote workers 'get in the office or get out'? No, they can't, obviously.
What is the end game here? When IBM axes its U.S. remote workers citing the 'get in the office or get out' 'problem' suddenly IBM will suddenly have a real 'talent shortage'.
And they won't need to replace anyone, because they've all been let go already. And IBM can change its 'you have to be in the office' policy whenever and however it likes.
TLDR: f*ck IBM.
From other articles similar:
"IBM is facing similar financial challenges as the company's revenues continue to fall, and the policy move is essentially a way of laying off thousands of employees who can't afford on their current IBM salaries to move to a major metropolitan area like New York."
It seems pretty obvious to me whats going on here, and the 'but we want people in the office' 'for other reasons' narrative is frankly dumb, unbelievable, and shady at best.
For every Bill Gates, there are many, many, many incompetent male tech CEOs.
It's not gender, it's general incompetence. With a tiny pool of women tech CEOs, you would not expect a lot of massive successes if you apply the same competence percentage as male CEOs.
How does a CEO get a pay package like that if the shareholders are irate about it? Isn't it the shareholders that decide to approve the pay package?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
But th3e men aren't writing books about ywhat great CEOs they are.
With goals to reducing traffic contention and carbon emissions, I would think working from home is the future. Or even a hybrid solution of working at a space off-site closer to home - like rental spaces.
Of course, managers and companies would have to rely less on being present between 9 to 5 (or whatever). They would need to start measuring productivity by results.
Less traffic, less pollution, employer doesn't need to heat/cool a separate workspace for an employee, less real estate needed by the company. All around, WfH is a win/win so long as employees actually work.
There are plenty of examples of very successful (as in, did a great job) women tech CEOs. Selina Lo (Ruckus Wireless, among other things) is just stepping down following the Brocade buy-out.
https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/ruckus-wireless-founder-selina-lo-to-retire-in-may/2017/02/
So IBM has all this office real estate ready and waiting for all these employees to return to the office? Maybe that is a reason they are loosing so much money. Why are they keeping empty offices / cubes for people who are primarily working from home?
If they don't have the available office real estate, that means their bills are about to increase even more for sq footage, furniture, electric, water and so on.
Also if these employees are to just begin reporting to their closest regional office how does this fix anything with collaboration if the rest of the team is still spread all over the county? The only difference is you are sitting in an IBM sanctioned place rather than your home office?
Then there is the loss of productivity on the personal level assuming on average they are burning away an hour and a half to 3 hours per day commuting, that salaried employees may have used to put in some more time on a project. Or that employees are loosing out of their personal time, and are now using work time to take care of personal business. or they are just unhappy about the arrangement all together. Expect productivity to drop even more.
I have Jack Welch's book right here to say you're wrong.
But so far, the success rate of female CEOs in large companies is near 0%. For men, it's quite far from 0.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Let's shit on nerds.
It is the IBM environment and procedures for pushing changes. All of the management processes at IBM are specifically designed to slow progress, that is their point. First give the employee a good laptop, load it with two metric tons of security software (slow the pc to a crawl). Don't grant access to any tools without a presidential approval (meaning Trump, not CEO of IBM). Don't grant access to code without approval of congress. Don't allow code changes without UN approval (and expect a Russian veto).
Basically, without becoming a bit more developer centric and less management centric, nothing will change. Bringing remote workers in is just lip service.
Bad User. No biscuit!
Intel and I think HP did this too, and yes, it's a despicable way to force people to "quit" and deny them benefits. What isn't talked about as much is how much havoc it creates in the communities surrounding the offices. Employees desperate to keep benefits influx en masse, and a barn in a field becomes a $200,000 "home".
didnt ibm make a huge post like two weeks ago about how awesome remote working is for company culture? >_>
Advance to the rear!
More likely (as others have stated) "please quit."
> improve collaboration and accelerate the pace of work
I've been working from home for 10 years now; my office is an hour away--I only go there once a week, if that, for the occasional face-to-face meeting. One way to ensure my pace of work will NOT be "accelerated" is by having me get started with work each morning only after a one-hour commute.
You can bet I would also NOT be incentivized to stay at work past normal hours.
Remember when Marissa Mayer did the same thing to all the Yahoo remote employees? How did that work out for Yahoo?
We have determined that most of you are wankers that need to be smacked into working more often. Back to your cubies proles!
I've Been Moved is not new to IBM, but it was in a bit of a hiatus for a while. In the (forever ago) classic nuclear family days where there was one breadwinner moving was not fun, but it was conceivably possible, and IBM was for life. These days with real families trying to balance multiple career options, moving is far less viable. The result (regardless of intent) will almost certainly be older people leave the company.
I'm not in IT, but my friend hits the bong at 7am, "he" "works" 12 hours then signs out.
He has a program to log him in, do a few things, then logout as he takes a shower, goes shopping, fucks around. It makes it look like he's doing work.
I'm not sure working from home is good for companies.
That's silly, I would think most will leave if given the choice.
Watson is calling the shots, behind the curtain. It was tasked with cutting expenses, and it was trained using a large corpus on employment law!
Each chair in IBM's offices will capture heat from the seat-warmer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hemployee and used to offset energy bills.
Requiem for the American Dream
https://developers.slashdot.or...
That said, I'm all for a basic income for everyone! Especially 20s-30s something people who are often running on little sleep from taking care of young children...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I worked for IBM for 10 years from home. In that time, they have done everything to make sure they don't promote workers and push the jobs oversees to very inexperienced just out of school workers and then wonder why customers are disappearing. This new push is just another way to get rid of workers without paying severance and unemployment, disgusting!
I was forced to spend more time doing online training that had nothing to do with my job, and other bs then trying to make a better IBM. Good luck every getting a promotion, so much red tape, it's almost impossible. In regards to collaboration, we are often told not to go above and beyond for customers because they were not paying for it, hence frustrating the customer and workers. Although, I know the customers were paying at least 3 times what I what I was being paid.
I left in '15 of my doing, best decision I made because now I get to do all the things IBM told me not to without all the other crap, am a superstar again and recognized for it. In two years I have received five times the % of raises at my new company than in 10 years with IBM. Yes it's true.
How about this IBM, give your workers the job specific tools to do a good job, use tools the rest of the market is using, give workers the training related to their jobs again to make them leaders in field, stop offshoring to workers who have no clue how to do the work or even communicate, stop giving all the management raises and bonuses every year and skipping out on the workers who are actually bringing in the money. IBM if you want more, than give more. Nothing will change no matter where your workers are.
Good luck to my friends who still are there, sounds like another screw you from big blue!
From a 20 year IT veteran
Won't work. Companies will outsource generic low skill work to other companies through tenders, and then divides the rest of the company into wholly owned subsidiaries. The CEO and his buddies stay in the parent company. The CEO of the parent company, the 'CEO' of each subsidiary, only earns 4 or 5 time more than the lowest paid employee within that company. High fives all around the board room.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
Change the language to any worker who earns money that contributes to the companys bottom line, and put some language about attempted subversion of the law being punished with a mandatory 10 year prison sentence felony conviction.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
So disappointing... Take good idea and misuse to get rid of employees. Rarely does one size fit all in life.