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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.
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."
It's a stealth layoff. They are betting that a good number of the remote employees will be unwilling to relocate, and quit. But if enough of them do actually come to the offices, then there will be another round of layoffs in the near future.
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.
When you don't know how to manage your workers, you do it the easy way by watching the punch-clock. It does absolutely nothing to help your company, but it's easy, and it makes the boss feel good.
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
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.
It's not just a stealth layoff, it's stealth ageism. I'd wager that much of IBM's older, higher salaried workforce is participating in the remote program, while the workers who are already in the urban centers around the offices or are willing to uproot their lives to move to one are younger and cheaper.
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.
As an older worker, I'm extremely offended that you would assume I'm unwilling to comply with job requirements and move if necessary to retain a job I am good at and I love. That is extremely discriminatory.
It's not specifically age related. Age is being used as a catchall for people in the age range where they have a family and kids. If your kids are in a good school with lots of friends in a nice community are you going to move or look for another job?
Working in the nearest city may require uprooting the whole family and moving to an area with higher housing prices, etc. People have done it. Most prefer not to if they can help it, at least until the kids are old enough to be in college, etc.
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
That's a major improvement over posting similar stories twice in 24 hours.
Exactly. HP did the same thing 2-3 years ago. They wanted to get headcount down. They offered an early retirement, but not enough people took it because the package wasn't great. So then they changed the work-from-home policy which had been in place for years and insisted everybody had to go back to an office. Problem was they had eliminated lots of offices as a previous cost-cutting measure, so many employees had no office anywhere near their home. HP said no exceptions - drive to an office, even if it's hours each way, or be fired for non-compliance with company policy. Doesn't matter if you quit or get fired, they don't have to pay you early retirement or severance either way, so it's a great way to reduce headcount without costing them any money.
It is IBM's business and business MODEL that are killing IBM>
In recent years, I had to work with one of their products they bought a couple years back.
The original product, worked GREAT was small, efficient, and on Linux you had a GUI-less install that worked just fine. Easy to configure and just *worked*.
Now..wind forward a couple years to now.
NOW they have forced this great stand alone product, to work on WAS (Websphere Applicaton Server), and other layers of unnecessary applications and abstraction...and the fun thing is...NO ONE at IBM knows how the fuck all the parts and pieces actually work now.
You put in a service request on the product in question...you get help to a point, then they say.. "Oh, that's a WAS problem" and send you there...they send you back saying it is an installer problem...etc, etc etc.
I won't even get into the troubles that come with trying to traverse the cluster fuck that is their IBM Passport advantage, trying to find all the many part numbers that will actually make the *magic* combination of parts that will work together.
They try to sell you to the service guys for this, who often...have problems figuring this out themselves.
IBM is $$$$...bloated, too many groups within that cannot and do not talk to each other...THAT is why they suck.
I remember the old saying:
"No one ever got fired for hiring IBM".
If I were a project manager today, if someone so much as got two of the three letters of IBM out of their mouth...I'd CAN that motherfucker in a heartbeat.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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!"
they will have the attrition numbers they seek.
I wish them luck. The people that leave are the ones with the most marketable skills. The ones that hang on through all the bullshit are the fuck-ups who couldn't get work elsewhere.
Have gnu, will travel.
Their products aren't what they used to be, what products they even have left, but their professional services are still the best in the industry.
When people talk about IBM and services, that means professional services. When you're talking about IBM Passport Advantage that is end-user support for their enterprise software. That's the hand-holding that is included with the software product. That isn't what they're famous for. What they're famous for is their Professional Services; when you don't just license their software, you also hire their engineers to install it and help your engineers get everything perfect. When you're using Passport Advantage it means you don't even have engineers running it, you've got IT guys who can't read manuals very well. They were never known for providing that!