After a year of that I set the phone system to call forwarding to my home line, copied the programs to my hard drive at home, and instead offered 24 hour support. It worked great in that instance, but how does a company train a new hire? How do they develop and mentor a new hire? How does an employee working remotely compliment other work groups office based?
With employees job hopping every three years, home or remote based work should not be happening. We had a remote employee direct software licenses and numerical keys to his home. He jumped jobs and we couldn't use our plant triage programs along with some drives configuration yearly licensed keys. Our company counsel advised not to litigate it, but to spend the extra $70K for new licenses and keys.
You can't trust most people when they are not observed in the office.
It's no longer what it was like for you in the 1980s.
We have better oversight online than we ever had in the office. I can see just how long each task was dragged along before being completed, something we could never do with folks swishing paper and "ideas" around in the office.
“how does a company train a new hire? How do they develop and mentor a new hire?”
Before I retired that was exactly what I did.
We spent one week in the local office where I gave “basic training” and showed them how to find information they needed. In most cases they were from elsewhere in the country so they had to fly into my area.
Then both of us went home.
The next few weeks they had lots of questions which I handled with daily phone calls and lots of instant messaging.
As they got up to speed the phone calls and IMs were still there but less frequent.
After six months or so they were good to go.
Easy peasy.
That sounds like a management failure.