IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week
- Reference: 1694413930
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/09/11/ibm_software_tells_workers_to/
- Source link:
In an internal blog published on September 5, IBM Software's Kareem Yusuf, senior veep for product management, and Dinesh Nirmal, senior veep for products, refer to "setting the tone" at the organization.
"If we want to maintain the flexibility of working both remote and in the office, we must be better stewards of getting into the office," they write in the piece seen by The Register .
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"Starting next week, all IBM Software employees will be required to spend at least 3 days in the office each week. The decision on which days will be left to managers and individual project teams," the blog adds.
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Initially, employees living within 50 miles (80 kms) of an IBM office will be called in. Those that live further from an IBM office are "exempt at this time" - suggesting the clock is ticking for them, too.
The return to office orders will be implemented according to applicable local laws, according to the execs.
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"It is vital to our culture and our shared goals – tripling development output, building winning products, and winning new clients – that we spend more meaningful time together, in-person."
Each of the IBM Software locations is appointing Software Executive Focals – onsite staff tasked to strong-arm support employees as "we make this more concerted effort across Software."
"Right now, 1 in 4 of you are working in the office three days a week. By October, we want to see that number closer to 3 in 4. We appreciate your attention and support," Yusuf and Nirmal sign off cheerfully.
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We have asked IBM if its other divisions are doing something similar. Also how it will police the return to office – Meta is tracking employees' badges – and what the timeframe is for other returners.
The corporation is just the latest in a growing list of tech vendors that facilitate remote work but are also keen to get their own people working in-person again – albeit for part of the week. Google lamented that its own offices had become like [6]ghost towns , Meta – which promotes the metaverse, remember – told all staff, including engineers, they [7]were better together . And Salesforce is encouraging workers back to the office after claiming [8]productivity for remote workers was lower .
Dell projected in 2020 that the majority of its workforce would forever change the way they work – yet it too is calling staff back for some days a week. And even the pandemic poster child for communications, Zoom, is demanding all staff come back in for three days a week – recently opening up a plush new London pad.
[9]Get your staff's consent before you monitor them, tech inquiry warns
[10]Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks
[11]Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan
[12]'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'
Big corporations still have major investments in real estate to justify to shareholders, and management at many companies prefer to see bums on seats – a phenomenon Microsoft previously termed [13]productivity paranoia . IBM's boss Arvind Krishna himself said earlier this year that [14]remote workers could be overlooked for promotion because managers like to see the person whose work they supervise.
Recent [15]research by Sony indicated just seven percent of UK office workers are fully remote and 41 percent of 2,600 white collar workers polled still prefer a dedicated office – 53 percent favoring office-based work to home.
On the flip side, Atlassian research indicated that return to office mandates are [16]bad for staff morale and stifle innovation , bosses that force a return [17]risk losing key staff , and 80 percent of execs who made that call [18]regretted it . ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/07/wfh_google_clouds_offices_empty/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/02/meta_return_to_office_mandate/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/salesforce_new_hires_less_productive_claims_benioff/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/10/workplace_monitoring_select_committee/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/03/blue_origin_wfh_rules_change/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/05/job_quitting_agents/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/29/wfh_report/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/21/proximity_bias_workforce_productivity/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/04/working_home_ibm/
[15] https://pro.sony/es_PT/press/corporate-research
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/12/wfh_mandates_bad_for_staff/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/29/wfh_rto_survey/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/15/return_to_office_survey/
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Maybe adding employees' travel-to-work should be added to a company's carbon footprint might help managers see sense here.
A bit of green-washing can be good!
Even better, consider the employees' commute as part of their working time, so 1-hour commute = 6 hour working day instead of 8
But instead of the environmental cost of travelling, there is the cost of heating each workers home, so it is not a simple calculation.
I think pretty much all attempts to measure the productivity of software development have failed. Insofar as there have been attempts to measure the return on investment of software projects, it's not made for pleasant reading. The only metric that really matters is whether people continue to pay for it at a rate that covers the cost - but that doesn't seem to be a factor in these latest edicts from the temple of management.
I wonder if the real problem is that a bunch of execs are finding themselves very exposed rattling around in expensive, empty premises whilst the people they are nominally supposed to manage are self-organising and getting the work done without them. That kind of productivity is dangerous.
" I think pretty much all attempts to measure the productivity of software development have failed.
I worked on a contract where the project manager decided that such productivity could be measured by counting the number of semicolons in the source code, and got someone to write him a script to do so.
Soon after this edict, function description blocks started becoming outlined in semicolons rather than asterisks. Two blocks a day was the informally agreed rate among developers IIRC.
Not a good idea.
I will work out how to do the most work with the least effort, so will reuse lots of code written to be reused.
As in the past we had junior developers knocking out the simpler screens by copying what was done before.
I managed to remove 90 or so screen classes and inherited the lot from one.
I've seen studies used to support all kinds of things which clearly weren't working or at best made no difference. I've seen 'bubble spaces' introduced after a study showed they'd be a "good thing" but in reality they're hardly ever used except as overflow storage areas.
So it would be hard to know if a study to look at the pros and cons of home working would be of any help. Those who didn't like the outcome would say the study was faulty... and they might be right... or it could be right for the wrong reasons.... :-)
I know it's not popular on these pages but the reality is in the area where I'm living that more and more people are returning to the office at least three days a week. I've seen the traffic queues getting back to their pre-COVID levels (not as bad but getting that way). I think some people prefer working at the office and at a certain point others just find it easier to join them.
Obviously I don't speak for the whole world!
Hilarious
This is hilarious, because I used to work for IBM as a contractor. I chose to drive to Warwick one day a week to get some face time, however some of the others only came in once a month to get their timesheet signed. It worked perfectly well, as we all has chat facilities and could jump on a call. This was 15 years ago IIRC. How things have progressed.
I also seem to remember they made significant savings by renting out the buildings to other companies. Probably not so profitable now.
Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?
These return to the office edicts keep popping up with actual verifiable facts and figures to back them up, the arguments put forward by the executive class amount to they are lonely and they haven't worked out how to do their jobs properly yet so they need people around to make them look good. Put forward some proper reasons for it if you want to motivate people to return to the office.
Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?
Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy and Research, huh what do they know?
“Fully remote work is associated with 10% to 20% lower productivity than fully in-person work.”
https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productive-wfh-research/
Hybrid is best, according to the data: “thehighest paid group on average accounts for nearly 30% of employees. They typically work from home 2 or 3 days a week and commute to business premises the rest of the week.”
“The third group of employees work fully remotely. They tend to work in IT-support, call-center, payroll, HR, or benefits jobs that require more limited interaction. These jobs are mostly computer based, often involving mostly individual tasks, and usually easily monitored. We expect the number of fully remote jobs to continue declining in the longer term. [These] will relocate overseas as firms exploit lower labor costs in countries like Mexico, India, and the Philippines. Other jobs may be automated by artificial intelligence, which increasingly can perform routine tasks in HR, payroll, and call center positions.”
Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?
And yet this paper from the same institute shows the exact opposite.....
https://web.archive.org/web/20201101022720/https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/f/wfh.pdf
Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?
Yes, that was an earlier paper, and made very famous by the WFH advocates. They authors have now retracted it
Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?
https://twitter.com/GregDaco/status/1654126098794565639
5 straight quarters of productivity decline, which has essentially never happened since 1948. This is not a normal recession. It’s not WFH…..yeah. It’s WFH.
"tripling development output"
Setting up impossible goals to justify moving to full-time working-from-office and future firings...
Setting organisation wide mandates for how often staff need to be in the office will only breed (more) resentment. As a manager I see the benefits of both working from home and staff coming together in person. For me, different teams come into the office different amounts depending on their needs. Some come into the office almost daily, whereas others come in maybe once every six months.
Flexible working is here to stay. Let's be sensible and let teams and managers decide what works best for them. If a team or person aren't being as productive as you think they should be, then that's a HR matter for the people involved that needs to be addressed.
A corporate edict of "You must be in th office X days out of Y" is pointless. There are only two possible reasons for these edicts:
1 - Stupid top brass
2 - The company has signed expensive leases on offices which they can't get out of and want to see some return on their money.
Back to office mandates are very helpful
We've long known that the vast majority of companies do nothing and employ a lot of people to do it (and consequently drive up our prices for nearly everything).
Now we know which ones.
"The company has signed expensive leases on offices which they can't get out of and want to see some return on their money."
Which is a sunk-cost fallacy. If they can't get out of the lease, they have to pay the same amount for it whether it's empty or full*, in which case might as well go for the option that gives the highest productivity (which for all accounts is giving teams the option to choose themselves where they want to work from).
*In fact an empty building also saves on power, heating, cleaning and maintenance.
This suggestion comes after whittlling down their workforce by removing all the people who are used to being in an office and had already resigned themselves to doing so for the rest of their life in favour of the people who have grown up with the internet surgically attached to their hip?
I have to attend an office 40% of the time for my job.
However when I attend is up to me, if I have to go to another office or a DC then that counts as a day in the office.
Normally I am there the days it is most useful for me i.e. those with big meetings, or for hardware installation / maintenance. Also if I go in 3 days one week I only have to do 1 day the next week. Some of my colleagues are in the office 5 days a week (but then they live a mile from work) it is down mostly to you.
Besides the office is 50 miles each way, so doing it a lot becomes rather expensive on fuel.... yes I could take a train but it would cost more and take 2 hours rather than the 1 driving each way.
A small correction...
IBM Software, sensing an easy way of culling staff, has mandated a swift return to the office for staff globally, telling those living within a 50 mile (80km) radius of a Big Blue office to be at their desks at least three days a week.
IBM also called on the government to also large corporations to allow the use of guns in their HR practices to cull the weak, infirm or those they just considered too expensive.
Impact on staff
People casually say companies putting return to work in place will lose staff. Where the staff will go? If most of the companies have similar hybrid work policies, there wont be too many options. Also blaming the senior executives doesnt make sense as they themselves may not want to come to office, but have to due to collective mandate. Its impossible to tell now, only hindsight will, which model is/was better and how many days in office are ideal etc. Till then lets just keep aligning with company policies. The talent market has cooled and no one is out there to hire so many people if they want to leave their current firm protesting return to work initiatives.
Re: Impact on staff
> . Also blaming the senior executives doesnt make sense as they themselves may not want to come to office, but have to due to collective mandate.
Who creates this "collective mandate" you suggest exists? Answer: the senior executives. It isn't coming from the bulk of the workers and if it was just a Command From On High then it would not have any collectiveness to it.
If it comes from the junior managers whining they can not cope then the seniors can just tell the juniors to pull their socks up and get on with making it work: junior managers don't get a mandate of their own against the senior execs.
> Its impossible to tell now, only hindsight will, which model is/was better
From the article, which quotes an earlier article: "80 percent of execs who made that call regretted it. "
80km????
So you want to impose a 2-hour drive each way for your staff (12 hours a week at least), and then expect productivity and/or morale to improve???
Good luck with that!!!
Re: 80km????
Three and a bit years ago people were already doing this. Smart employers were already offering some kind of flexible working as they saw it made their employees happier and hence more productive.
Lockdown made people realise how unpleasant big commutes were and so people lept at a more flexible working environment.
At our place, I'm hearing stories of people who have moved to be a 5 or 6 hour commute from their new home to the office and are refusing to ever set foot on company premises ever again. If that's part of you working your notice so be it, but as a permanent working arrangement? I'm not so sure.
Meta
Perhaps they could issue each worker a VR headset and, when they are in the office in meetings/conversations with colleagues, they will be transported to a view at home.
Ticks both boxes. Physically In the office and collaborating with VR
Swing! That Blue Axe!
Sam P fired and merged Hardware and Software and Business and Services.
GinR flushed and drained the entire company.
AriK is glorifying the good ole days buying new properties and pinkslipping all excess.
So the next step is leasing...
But what ? Places ? Museum pieces? People?
Watch as Immovable Building Masoleum is a tourist attraction soon
spend more meaningful time together
We have the go ahead from corporate. Your place or mine?
Has anyone actually produced an independent analysis of worker productivity remote/office to back this up?
I can see good reasons for being together as a team during certain aspects, but equally I can see that many jobs, especially software, can be done just as well, if not better, at one's own home with few distractions and less of one's life wasted commuting.