After reversing its position on remote work, Dell is reportedly implementing new tracking techniques on May 13 to ensure its workers are following the company’s return-to-office (RTO) policy, The Register reported today, citing anonymous sources.
Dell will track employees’ badge swipes and VPN connections to confirm that workers are in the office for a significant amount of time.
Dell’s methods for tracking hybrid workers will also reportedly include a color-coding system. From “consistent” to “limited” presence, the colors are blue, green, yellow, and red.
The Register reported today that approximately 50 percent of Dell’s US workers are remote, compared to 66 percent of international workers.
An examination of 457 companies on the S&P 500 list released in February concluded that RTO mandates don’t drive company value but instead negatively affect worker morale. Analysis of survey data from more than 18,000 working Americans released in March found that flexible workplace policies, including the ability to work remotely completely or part-time and flexible schedules, can help employees’ mental health.
“You must go in to the office, so that you can get on calls with your team or other teams, which are in the other global offices.” (rolling eyes)
Where I work they are so fucking stupid they are making everyone go back to the office to ‘foster collaboration’ but all the seating is random - you sit somewhere new every day, first come first served. What useful tasks am I going to collaborate on with random people from all different parts of the company sitting around me each day? It shows that the executives are just fucking liars and aren’t willing to tell the truth, which is that they need people spending money in the cities to help with their portfolios. Or they are just doing what everyone else is doing. Or they’re just on a power trip. Or all of the above.
My current company stated that if you have a local office and want to go there fine, but otherwise do your job where it makes sense. Of course my boss is on one coast, the rest of my team is spread out in multiple states on the other coast, and I’m kind of in the middle of the country.
Mine told everybody “if you have a local office and want to go there fine, otherwise you’re laid off. Also we’re closing a bunch of offices so if you don’t live near one anymore you have to move at your own expense. Otherwise you’re laid off. Also no job guarantee even if you do move, we might lay you off the next day. Hey why is morale in the toilet?”
A few months ago my director started discussions on return to office mandates. No one else really paid any attention.
I went in today and nobody is here, including my director. I don’t think anyone thinks the commute is worth the value they’re pitching.
I should have slept in an extra two hours.
Worst are the meetings of international work groups. Stressful travel, being away from the family for days, sitting in a shitty meeting room talking about the same shit you talk about online and then sitting with a bunch of people getting senseless drunk, cringing constantly. I hate those meetings.
Used to be so awesome during corona. Took 4-6 hours, comfortably sitting in my home office, now it takes 3 days costing maybe 50,000€, instead of 0€, without more results.
I never went back to the office after the pandemic.
I actually got really sick and had to spend a small amount of time in hospital, afterwards I might have slightly played up the emotional trauma to management so they couldn’t try that BS. Eventually they did anyway I along with a lot of my colleagues quit and got another job straight away.
Apparently they have now flip-flopped again and are back to permanent work from home for everyone who wants it. I wonder if losing a third of their work force in a month had something to do with that.
100% homeoffice jobs are incredibly rare in Germany. I have 50% homeoffice which is quite good for German standards. Even at the height of Corona the offices weren’t empty here.
You can tell how important working from the office is by the fact that they can’t tell whether or not people are working from the office.
Maybe people need to start talking about unionizing while in the office.
Nah, just quit en masse, especially the people who have the most experience there. Dell can’t do business if it doesn’t have people…
Not sure why you’re getting down voted. This is exactly what happened at my last company during the RTO push, senior employees, including me, were leaving in droves and it got bad quickly. As a result the company upped their salaries and offered fully remote work instead of just hybrid to keep people around. The only way a company will listen is if you hit them in their wallets.
Probably because I didn’t say “unionize.”
A union isn’t going to fix a broken company culture, it’s just going to get more bargaining power for employees. The union won’t change priorities for the executive team to prioritize cyber security, customer-friendly products, and it probably won’t change company policy around badging. It might get more WFH, but if the executive team is hell-bent on tracking its users, the union will probably shift focus to better benefits (oh, you want to screw us over more? Pay more!).
So no, I don’t think it’s worth trying to unionize and fix the company from within. Quit and take all of that institutional knowledge with you to hit them where it counts: the stock price.
Did they think that’d give them good optics or do they just not care?
So I’ve worked in business for 17ish years now, and the only consistent thing I can say about business leadership is they are there to have their egos stroked.
They do not care about money or other people until they look bad, and even then they don’t do anything until someone threatens to take away the group of people forced to listen to them.
Working from home hurts their ego. This method (RTO) doesn’t improve value and increases turnaround, which increases expenses if you are happy with the amount of people working for your company, as replacing people costs money.
So either Dell still needs to get rid of people, or a bunch of old fucks need someone to suck up to them in person.
Are their egos fragile because they know the people who do the real work are… not them?
Hard to say, you could be right. That’s where I’m less sure. I’ve had jobs where a (not direct manager) boss thinks I do less than I do, and more than I do.
The ones who believed I did less believed they did more than me regardless of what my manager reported or actual work done. The ones who believed more consistently didn’t hand me work and I eventually would leave.
One job I had different people who disagreed about the actual amount of work I did based on if I was at my desk vs the amount of awards I had vs my lunch breaks vs my extra work projects. I’d have feedback sessions with my manager about burnout but also if I was taking too long for lunch and going home too early.
What I’m saying is I think people are terrible at assessing subordinates work.
This came straight from Michael Dell, per multiple conversations with directors and managers at Dell. He’s probably trying to squeeze out all the old employees to replace them with cheaper people. There’s no clear reasoning at all, which means it’s underhanded bullshit or he’s a moron.
Yeah I was wondering if it was an underhanded way to get rid of people without officially letting them go. Seems like a lot of time and money tracking people to do that though, so I really have to wonder if they’ve lost the plot, thus me leaning towards incompetence.
That all said, and to hedge my bets, I haven’t seen their Financials. Maybe the verification is using cheap labour like YouTube review systems, for instance, or maybe they are really bloated.
I really like my job but if they started monitoring my data like that I’d absolutely quit. There’s already a monitoring mechanism, it’s called your boss needing you to complete tasks on time. If you’re doing that, the only thing data monitoring does it falsely call out people who are doing their work.
I will not work for a company that thinks it needs to babysit it’s employees. The idea that you have to constantly micromanage someone is ridiculous, if they’re that shit at their job, you let them go and get someone else for the role.
This sounds like a recipe for malicious compliance if I ever heard it.
Many people chose a ‘remote’ role that requires no office visits but hamstrings your career growth. I know a bunch now enforcing 5PM as the end of their day. But there will always be happy worker bees.
Many people chose a ‘remote’ role that requires no office visits but hamstrings your career growth.
Not really. Everyone knows that in the business world the only way to reliably get a promotion is to switch companies anyway. So I can be on permanent work from home and then when I want a better job I can just switch to another company, that may or may not require me to go into the office sometimes. I can have my cake, and eat it.
It is not the 1930s anymore, I don’t have to work for the same company my entire life. Everyone but the business people seem to know this.
