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Exclusive IBM is cracking down on remote workers, ordering unlucky employees to either come into one of six main offices and work "shoulder to shoulder" – or leave for good.
In a confidential video message to staff seen by The Register on Tuesday, chief marketing officer Michelle Peluso told her US marketing troops they must work at "a smaller set of locations" if they want to continue with the company. Staffers have 30 days to decide whether to stay or go.
This means affected IBMers who telecommute, work at a smaller district office, or otherwise work separately from their team, will now have just a few weeks to either quit their jobs, or commit to moving to another part of America. The company's employee badge system will be used to ensure people do come into the office rather than stealthily remain remote workers.
According to sources, the six "strategic" offices US marketing staff must work from are in: Austin, Texas; San Francisco, California; New York City, New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Atlanta, Georgia; and Raleigh, North Carolina. El Reg understands that employees will not get to choose a nearby office, but will instead be assigned a location based on where their team is predominantly situated. The first wave of workers were informed of the changes on Monday. The next wave will be instructed in early March, we're told.
Marissa Mayer has worked wonders at Yahoo and the rest of the tech industry should follow her lead?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aliks on Thursday February 09 2017, @11:20AM
I have worked lengthy telecommute projects where the team can almost never meet in one place, and it was blindingly obvious that a good proportion (I'd say 25%) of team members were only working halftime - 3 or 4 hours a day.
They can usually get away it if they deliver to the allocated deadlines, respond to urgent management requests, or are supposedly working on multiple projects.
I'm sure there are situations where everyone is working at highly productive rates and the company is benefitting, but I've not seen it myself.
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To err is human, to comment divine
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Thursday February 09 2017, @11:39AM
... and you think those people will behave differently in an office? I work at home about half the time and it's by far my most productive time. Even though I wear noise cancelling headphone at the office, the interruptions drop my productivity drastically.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Thursday February 09 2017, @12:15PM
thank you, i KNOW my productivity is higher at home for a number of verifiable and practical reasons...
my job itself is ideal for telecommuting, AND there are several who do...
but my boss is both stupid and an asshole (NOTE: MOST of my experience with bosses in my career is the stupid ones knew enough to get out of the way of the professionals who knew what they were doing, this boss is not like that... he is the very embodiment of the peter principle...), and won't allow me to work from home UNLESS it is convenient for the company (ie power and/or internet goes out, well, sure you can go home and keep on producing for us while the other nimrods sit around for 2-4-6 hours waiting for the internet tubes to be fixed; jobs get backed up ? sure, you can work from home on the weekend to catch up... but work from home for MY convenience ? ? ? no fucking way, lazy, ripoff pig...)
the benefits are good for both sides of the equation, but the company i work for is so old-school, they have calvinist suspicions that a worker is actually happier and has more job-satisfaction when working from home, and we can't fucking have that, now can we ? ? ? no, back in the shitty, open-plan office that is like working in the middle of a high-school cafeteria, and, here is 30 lashes for you, too, commie symp...
(Score: 2) by BenJeremy on Thursday February 09 2017, @12:24PM
Yup. Working from home means I'm basically on call, and I tend to work more hours. Some of us actually hop on after dinner and do something because we just thought of it.
Let's not forget the lower cost of work-from-home workers in terms of less infrastructure.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Thursday February 09 2017, @03:22PM
I think it's a matter of trust. Perhaps your manager doesn't trust that you're doing work unless he sees you sitting at your desk.
Related:
If a train station is the place where a train stops, then what is a workstation?
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Saturday February 11 2017, @02:38AM
in this case, i am producing virtual 'widgets' , in the form of quantity takeoffs, various CAD graphics, and a data file for the shop...
they (meaning anyone and everyone in the company) can *see* the actual work i produce, AND the time i produced it/emailed it (whether at home or office), AND the elapsed time, as well as a chat app to annoy me in real time (again, either at home or office, same thing)... it is an IDEAL job for tele-commuting, as the exact same processes are used at home or the office...
the ONLY difference is that there is no face-to-face with sales reps/mgrs who are asking questions about a takeoff, etc... *BUT*, we can be 20 feet away from each other in the office, and most of the time it is more efficient to drop an email or a chat to get a question answered...
no, i am betting (have not gone back to the spreadsheet where all these jobs are cataloged) both the actual number of jobs, and the complex jobs i do are done in greater quantity/quality at home in the same period of time...
further, i know some of the development type work i have done customizing the CAD s/w, spreadsheet links, etc was best done at home where i could hear my brain cells squishing around...
in this case, i am pretty sure it has nothing to do with what is better for me or the company, but the simple human pettiness of a boss who has maxed out on their peter principle...
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Sunday February 12 2017, @12:37AM
Right, that makes a lot of sense. I'm just trying to figure out what it is psychologically about your boss that causes him to insist you work on site. Perhaps just adherence to tradition? Feeling like he's giving you a pass from some kind of 'duty' or giving you an undeserved favor if you work from home?
Maybe he just doesn't know how important this is to you and is worried about how other people would view him if he let you work form home.
My brother had a coworker who would always do the bare minimum and spent as much time as he could watching youtube on the clock. There was some reorganization at the company, and this coworker got promoted to manager. My brother was talking to a new hire who came in after this happened, and the new hire said something about doing the bare minimum and slacking off, to which my brother replied, "Be careful, if you do that, they might promote you to manager."
You know, I like doing the things I do at work -- the actual tasks. The parts I don't like all involve interfacing with other people. I really don't want to think deeply about what that says about me as a person.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Sunday February 12 2017, @02:45PM
i appreciate your response, and part of it is impossible to talk about as far as a personal aspect which is difficult to quantify or even confirm...
but here is a taste: this is a HEAVILY 'christian' company, from tippy top to bottom... i am not xtian (i believe in one less god than they do)... i have never said that there, but i *suspect* previous employers informed them (again, there is virtually no way to know behind-the-scenes communications like this)...
this -i *suspect*, again, part of the problem of wrestling with the smoke and fog of discerning someone else's state of mind- is what i believe is the source of my bosses distrust of me in general, and -frankly- discrimination against me in particular...
this particular job function *was* done from home historically, and only became centralized when they opened a home office... there is still one guy who does work from home 100% of the time, and two of us have worked from home when we were too sick to go to the office, but not so debilitated we couldn't work at all, or we had to wait on a cable tech, etc...
no, i think it is personal with this boss; were i xtian, i think he would allow it...
no practical way to 'prove it', but that is real life some times...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @03:49PM
Same here, especially since the boss fell in with the open workspace fad. Unfortunately, he's big into buzz-word Agile, so he wants butts in seats and checkboxes in Rally, and damn the actual output or productivity.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday February 09 2017, @07:06PM
People goof around in the office too. A lot of people just talk to each other all day.
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(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Saturday February 11 2017, @12:02PM
EXACTLY, i frequently say something out of the side of my mouth to a fellow CAD tech when we hear the admin side of the office laughing and laughing and laughing... i say i wish i could get one of those laughing jobs, but i have to actually produce stuff for a living... ha ha ha
i bet MOST of admin and sales spend at least a third/half the day holding up door frames and bullshitting... fucking useless, the lot of them... sorry, i get bad ju-ju from most managers, marketing and sales droids; while i realize their 'job' is different, SO many of them are SO full of shit, i wouldn't trust them not to fuck up a bb...
accountability ? us low peons have it in spades; admin and management ? UN-fucking-ACCOUNTABLE FOR SHIT...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by microtodd on Thursday February 09 2017, @02:25PM
Hang on a second.....
if they deliver to the allocated deadlines, respond to urgent management requests, or are supposedly working on multiple projects
If they are doing all of those things, why does management give a crap if they are working 2 hours a day or 12 hours a day? They are getting everything done....the company is getting from them the value they expect, and they are not letting the team down if they are meeting their milestones and helping with side-injection management requests.
So what's the concern here again? That someone can be productive and get their work done in 4 hours? Instead you want to squeeze them and get 8 hours out of them? Maybe those 4 hours they work REALLY HARD with no goofing off. I mean heck, in an office half your time is probably goofinf off anyways so it all works out in the end.
But if you start judging people by number of hours instead of results and output, that's where (imho) you're headed for trouble cause you're going to lower morale and you're treating people like cogs. Treat your people like grownups, be happy they are meeting their milestones and being available to communicate when needed, and be a progressive, forward-thinking leader, and you'll build HUGE morale and loyalty.
(Score: 2) by microtodd on Thursday February 09 2017, @02:28PM
I just realized the answer to my own post.......billable hours.
Which is why I hate T&M contracts and prefer FFP.....I can work REALLY HARD for a short while and get it done, so basically I make money by outworking the competition.
(Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Thursday February 09 2017, @03:10PM
If somebody is getting their job done, the number of fixed hours worked should not matter. When I was salary, I was expected to work extra hours as-needed and uncompensated. Because of that, I took the point of view that, if my work was done for the day then so was my day. My jobs are always output driven not hours driven so this worked for me. For the telecommuter, I would imagine most knowledge-based jobs are output driven as well. Unless there is some expectation that the person is 100% on-call during business hours, I assume most telecommuters I work with are available are checking email during normal business hours bt I do not assume I will get an immediate response. Assuming their work is getting done, it does not make much difference.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 09 2017, @03:14PM
Inciteful: if you don't trust your employees who telecommute, then you probably shouldn't have even hired them.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by termigator on Thursday February 09 2017, @04:25PM
> that a good proportion (I'd say 25%) of team members were only working halftime - 3 or 4 hours a day.
Wow, that is actually higher than the typical office worker. Folks in the office are just as good, and if not more clever, on appearing busy and avoiding work. The bit in the movie Office Space where the main character describes his work day is pretty spot on for many people working in offices.
Anytime I see companies force telecommuters to come in, it is basically a way for companies to do a "layoff" without the expense of actually doing a layoff. Set up work conditions where folks will voluntarily quit, avoiding the need to pay out severance packages.
Managers that cannot tell if their employees are productive, either office or telecommuters, are piss-poor managers. They are the ones that should axed.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday February 10 2017, @02:24AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Thursday February 09 2017, @06:06PM
Whatever, I've worked with people in an office who don't do jack.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.