Dell risks employee retention by forcing all teams back into offices full-time
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"A thirty-second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes on for hours or even days."
You know, I could have sworn I solved multiple engineering design issues yesterday from home by using Teams to call another employee who was at home ~300 miles away!
You know, I could have sworn I solved multiple engineering design issues yesterday from home by using Teams to call another employee who was at home ~300 miles away!
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No licking boots, just facts. If you don't like the rules of an employer, start your own business and make your own rules.
I wouldn't want someone like that applying for a job I was advertising. I'd want someone with a good work ethic that is dedicated to the organization and not themselves.
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Can you provide any examples of this? It seems that if this were true, companies wouldn't be asking people to RTO.
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I see it mainly in fintech (e.g. upstart absolutely creaming the competition) and security (e.g. wiz as the fastest growing company in the space). But I have friends at a lot of less well known places that are seeing significant competitive improvement (winning more deals, increasing margins, expanding hiring) because they aren't paying the huge cost of office space and are spending on R&D instead. To my eye the victory for remote-first companies is looking inevitable, people paying big bucks for full team office spaces just cannot compete with the extra ~20-30% employees that full remote gets you.
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Yes, you make that choice when you decide to work at a company. If you want to work remote, choose a remote first company. Want to work closely with other people, choose Dell
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RTO or remote will not help your problem. Nothing can help because you seem to be stuck in a bad management structure where you can either do A (tasks) or B (help people) and you will be criticized whatever you do.
The only advice I can give is to talk to your manager, and if that does not work to your manager's manager. Describe your situation and ask them how you can improve your work environment.
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Let's say you have a workforce that, coincidentally, is perfectly balanced between a desire for WFH and RTO.Yes, you make that choice when you decide to work at a company. If you want to work remote, choose a remote first company. Want to work closely with other people, choose Dell
Let's also say you didn't ask what everyone's preference was when you hired them.
So, 100 employees, 50 perform best at home, 50 perform best at the office.
As a business owner, which of these scenarios is the most efficient and cost-effective for your business?
(1) Make everyone work in the office. 50% of your workforce is now working below their maximum potential.
(2) Make everyone work from home. 50% of your workforce is now working below their maximum potential.
(3) Ask each employee where they feel most productive, and let them work there. 0% of your workforce is now working below their maximum potential.
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You can also get much cheaper employees if you hire from Latin America, eastern Europe and many parts of Asia compared to the USA.
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Most people will probably not choose to work where they perform the best work for the company, but rather what is most convenient for their life style.
But anyway, if the company makes a choice of remote or office, after a while you will get employees that are aligned with that choice since the other employees will go to different companies.
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Yes.
I fail to see how offering a job to someone, even if that job requires to be in an office, is coercion.
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While I generally agree with the premise you've presented -- that not all people necessarily work best under exactly the same conditions -- I do not concur with this conclusion. I believe the reality is closer to this: while some will do as you suggested, there will always be some portion of a workforce who choose the scenario which gives them the greatest opportunity to avoid work.
And oh-by-the-way... lest you misunderstand me, that isn't always perceived to be the work-from-home option.
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First, if they aren't performing their best work, then you address that, up to and including dismissal. Same as you would in person.
Second, what you're not getting is, the company doesn't have to lose half its employees to other companies, because the company does not have to make a binary, blanket decision of "all WFH" and "all RTO".
Third, you didn't answer my question. If you're imagining a company that is all one or the other, you eliminate even the possibility of Option #3, which is the correct answer to the question of "which of these options is the most efficient and cost-effective for your business".
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Then you discipline those employees! Why does everyone think managing a poorly performing employee is different depending on the employee's location in space? If they aren't doing their work, you replace them! And if you don't have a system in place to accurately measure whether remote employees are doing their work, that is 100% your failing as a manager.
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As Celery noted, absolutes are rarely the best choice, and rarely provide the results that were expected by the bean counters and/or decision makers. Some will go to other companies. Some will just be grumpy, and perform below par due to their disgruntlement.
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So, no real data that shows this, just anecdata that says some companies are doing well so it must be because of their remote work policies.
I hope that doesn't sound rude, but I was really hoping there were some actual studies that showed some correlation between remote work and growth. I don't have any skin in this game because I work for myself.
I guess we'll find out in the long run as I don't think even the most power hungry corporations will be able to resist the dollars once companies with remote work start popping up and kicking their butts.
I hope that doesn't sound rude, but I was really hoping there were some actual studies that showed some correlation between remote work and growth. I don't have any skin in this game because I work for myself.
I guess we'll find out in the long run as I don't think even the most power hungry corporations will be able to resist the dollars once companies with remote work start popping up and kicking their butts.
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First off, I'm not a manager. (Thankfully.)
Second off, over the course of my career, I've had the benefit of observing some of these types of scenarios from the outside -- that is, as someone who was neither the underperformer nor the manager/decision maker who needed to do something about the issue. You might very well be shocked at just how difficult it is to make a case to dismiss someone who is "merely" underperforming. It can literally take months or years, depending upon the circumstances.
And while -- as I said before -- I do favor providing the WFH option when it is reasonable to do so, it is important to recognize that: yes, managing an employee who is sitting in a cubicle right outside the manager's cushy office really is different from managing that same person when they're sitting in their favorite recliner in their bedroom. Part of the reason that some people prefer WFH is specifically because of those management related differences: the manager can't quietly (creepily?) hover behind an employee to discover what they're doing. (This is of course an exceptionally bad reason to mandate RTO... but if an employer were to acknowledge that as their reason, I'd at least be willing to give them points for honestly. Right now, we have Dell just making crap up. But I digress...)
Your tone suggests to me that you might well retort that it doesn't matter what they're actually doing, if they're not working... and I would disagree wholeheartedly. This approach entirely takes the humanity out of managing your "human resources". If a manager walks up behind an employee to find them having a serious discussion on their cellphone with their doctor, I would anticipate a very different reaction from that manager discovering that their employee is using that very same cellphone to play video games or watch a show on some streaming service.
Nevertheless, it is legitimately more difficult to make those kinds of assessments, when that employee isn't present. For better or worse, the manager has to adjust their management methods for WFH employees. They have to find ways to account for unknowns that would normally be easily discoverable. I'm not at all saying that WFH is all bad -- but it isn't necessarily perfectly simple either.
Life is complex. Managing people is complex. None of this is a simple binary equation.
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This x 1000.
As a middle manager, I have zero desire to micromanage my team, monitor their badge-ins, log VPN usage, etc. These are all things that good middle managers are made to do to satisfy decisions that are made without input from anyone beneath the executive level.
I fully believe that RTO is about C-level investments in real estate and justifying office space expenses rather than focusing on business goals and correctly identifying employees who drive the business forward, wherever they sit.
I conceptually understand that some roles and teams are better when they're brainstorming together, but I wouldn't expect that the executives making RTO mandates know (or care) which teams those are. And broad, sweeping mandates force middle-managers (who know their teams' needs) into the awful situation of having to fire and replace experienced, senior talent with clock-punchers.
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Indeed, I was lowballing the 20-30% estimate. Reality is that many virtual companies are able to double staff vs their office bound competitors.
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In my experience, the big talents, the rock stars usually are filled with talent but also a huge amount of hot air. Take the air out and you will notice that they are talented, but not exceptional at all. In the company where I worked, we had two such guys. When they left, they made sure that everyone knew that the company was doomed without them. It thrived and people enjoyed their work more. Kick the assholes out.
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Isn't it amazing how tech companies are at the forefront of the RTO wave and spout things like "What we're finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction,” which is as good as admitting that your technology is not improving peoples productivity. If that's true, they don't really have a business and we should all be sat in the same office using pen and paper with hardcopies moved between us and out customers/suppliers like they were back in the 70's.
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I can tell you, having retired from Dell as a developer not terribly long ago, that working from the office comes with significant downsides. A couple years ago, Dell moved developers aggressively from their wildly varying build and development machines to their internally supported OSes and machines only. Since many of their internal products and projects and developers use other operating systems (hundreds if not thousands of flavors of Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, various hypervisors, ...), their required systems all were forced onto VMs. Generally shared, very slow VMs. So developers tended to have their own servers at home with suitable development environments on dedicated hardware running the environments they required. From home, they VPN to their work networks and could mostly do what they need at reasonable speed.
ITs need to do this was clear: securing a widely accessible network of such wildly varying machines of often unpatched and/or unpatchable software was beyond nightmarish. And I suspect the various development divisions, projects, and groups will find ways to speed up their various tools and processes with shared more-local-VMs and whatnot. But it was making actual software/product development increasingly painful for quite a while.
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No, I've never worked for a government. This one was front-desk reception at an early wireless retailer. The only people who walked through the door were drug dealers wanting pager upgrades.
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The deal was for me to do everything asked of me, and that's what I did. Not being a sucker, I didn't ask for extra, unrelated work once my assignments were completed.
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