Posted on 05/21/2017 1:57:15 PM PDT by RoosterRedux
International Business Machines 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.
In the past, IBM has boasted that more than 40% of employees worked outside traditional company offices, and a May 4 post on the company's Smarter Workforce blog stated that "telework works."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxbusiness.com ...
>The individual might think they get more done at home but no one else does.
It depend on the Individual. Your words speak for you, an individual, and nobody else.
hmm seems like an big increase in office infrastructure costs... could be a way to get lots of people to quit without having a layoff I guess.
25 years
I loved remote work. I remember the first time I worked at home I brought 3 days of work home with me and was done by noon. It was surprising how much work I could accomplish at home.
That being said, I also know several who would abuse the system. You could always tell by how quickly they would respond to email.
I suspect too much abuse.
Most INM offices are away from the big cities. They are in the burbs
” I brought 3 days of work home with me and was done by noon. It was surprising how much work I could accomplish at home.”
Me too. Surprised me. It exposed how much office banter was worthless time suckers.
And in California a 5150 is your psych commitment
Will the "anytime" end at 5 PM, or will employees still be tethered to their phones for 24 hours a day?
And yet I’ve done it for 15 yrs and received several promotions. We have no local office, it allows for a geographically diverse talent pool. I’m not saying it doesn’t have negatives, for me it’s mainly never being AWAY from work...it’s always there and I do more hours than most. These days I travel a fair bit, so what benefit is it to have an office I must travel to year round? Here in Michigan that also introduces travel risk in the winter, I’m glad I don’t deal with it.
Having spent my entire career in health care,an industry not well suited to “home work” (at least not my positions),I don’t know much about this general subject.However,while I can see a large company like IBM wanting staff to be in the office at least occasionally (meetings,seminars,training) doing away with “home work” completely doesn’t seem to make sense.
“It depend on the Individual. Your words speak for you, an individual, and nobody else.”
No, my words speak for MANY people who are fed up with lazy employees that think only of themselves and their work from home. I’ve worked many years at home, and some of it very productive, but 100% days at home are detrimental to the overall project team. Some time needs to be spent face to face.
Ah... collaboration — the latest buzz phrase with the floor space nerds in technical companies. Move them back into a regional office where they can all get on separate conference calls and visit with their co-workers around the coffee pot a few times a day. :-). But don’t give them offices — that is too confined. Put them out on the floor jammed together so the “collaboration” of voices on separate conference calls sound like a third rate call center. I’m sure there is a Dilbert cartoon for this fad.
>my words speak for MANY people who are fed up with lazy employees
All good but that was not the point made or responded to.
I’m sure many milk it, but there are always exceptions.
Most utility patents are good for 20 years. Design patents are 14 or 15 years depending on when issued.
Sometimes the expiration date is extended due to delays in the patent office.
IMHO, IBM did not make this decision in a vacuum, but established metrics that defined the productivity of these home workers, as less than desirable.
I wonder if there is an information security issue at work. Keep all the data inside the firewall instead of on thousands of computers scattered around the country.
Or IBM needs to have layoffs and instead of offering severance packages tells telecommuters to now commute all the way to a regional office
Now they don't have to offer severance. Mo money, mo money, mo money
No, the use of private VPNs make it very secure. Need to have a decent ISP though, especially for your VOIP conference calls.
With the advent of telecommuting, many employees have "grown into" their jobs and locations so that if the spigot is turned off, as is happening at IBM, HP, Honeywell, etc... they will find themselves needing to do a long commute to an office where there are none of their co-workers. So, the theoretical advantage of face-to-face team work is lost, because the actual coworkers are in another city or country.
I know one person in this situation that does con-calls most of the time to the detriment of the native workers in his cubical neighborhood. Imagine you are a quiet in-office type, and some foreigner employee is given an office next to you constantly and loudly on the phone.
>IMHO, IBM did not make this decision in a vacuum, but established metrics that defined the productivity of these home workers, as less than desirable.
I tend to think same. I also suspect they will exceptions for the exceptional few. Exceptional case do exist. Obviously.
As a full time virtual employee, this is a stupid move. I get MUCH more done working at home than I ever did in an office. Not even close.
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