22 ms·

IBM says remote working is great after forcing employees to work from office

124 points by srinathrajaram 9y ago

drewg123 9y ago
An old friend recently parted ways with IBM after he was asked to relocate from the middle of nowhere to one of their major offices. They offered him minimal relocation, and a minimal COL based raise to move. He did the math, and realized that the cost of living was so high where was being asked to relocated (Almaden), that he'd be better off just letting his wife be the primary breadwinner and living on one income.
- srinathrajaram 9y ago
  That really sucks! The level of dissonance in this is overwhelming. In March - You need to work shoulder to shoulder "https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-thousands-of-employees-back-to-the-office/" https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... In May - we have a survey and a study and a panel that proves remote working is great! I don't envy the guy in IBM who has to sell Kenexa (https://www.ibm.com/blogs/smarter-workforce/2017/05/making-telework-work-insights-siop-2017/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/smarter-workforce/2017/05/making-t...).
  - drewg123 9y ago
    Yeah, it really sucked. He came in as part of an acquisition 7 or 8 years ago, and had been working remote for 10+ years from the same location. His kids were happy in school, his wife was happy in her job, they were involved in the local community. It just didn't make sense for them to move, financially or socially. The odd thing was that for him, this happened about a year ago. I think the edict came down almost exactly one year ago; this article makes it sound more recent.
    - xemdetia 9y ago
      From what I hear it's more of a staged rollout of who they are dragging back to the office. So waves of people are being disrupted and often making the obvious choice that seeking other employment is the best option. Or worse people that have a local office but their 'team' is based far enough away that it still counts as relocate or die.
      - zeveb 9y ago
        IBM has been dragging folks back to the office since 2009 (IIRC). They're not wrong about the benefits of colocation; it's just that they want the company to receive those benefits without compensating employees whatsoever.
        ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        Exactly. Look, if you already offer work from home, forget about taking it away. That will just piss people off, make people unhappy, hate management, and be less productive.
    - bhgraham 9y ago
      Yeah I was given the same choice around last March.
squozzer 9y ago
It's called "eating your own dog food" for a reason. What reason that is in this case, I have no idea.
- johnward 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure the reason is Agile. They don't think it's possible unless you are face to face at a standup. Also, moving people back to offices is a way to thin the herd without firing people.
derwiki 9y ago
> Leaning on insights from the public sector and the world of academia, the panelists came to the revelation that “teleworking works, and that associated challenges can be managed with careful planning and communication.” Efficient teleworking can be had for healthy orgs that practice careful planning and communication. But that does not imply IBM has healthy orgs that practice careful planning and communication.
archildress 9y ago
I work in a much more traditional industry than IBM, but I've recently been humored by management's resistance to remote work while hiring personnel in India to handle the "transactional" work.
- mysterydip 9y ago
  Maybe people should start telling management, "It's not working remotely, it's localized offshoring!"
  - VLM 9y ago
    I like the argument that they trust me to work on call, in fact they demand it, and all on call work is done remotely over the VPN. So just think of it as being on call during the day. It also helps if you can ease into flex time. You know I'm almost never here on Friday, but if you need me I always come thru remotely? Yeah, its gonna be like that Mon-Thur now too. It helps if all your coworkers work at other offices around the country. If you have a position where you mostly work with other teams all over the country, remote is perfect. I have three main "internal customers" each about 1000 miles apart. I don't even know what planet some of my coworkers are on much less if they're in an official office or not. If you have a position where you mostly work with a local team that meets in exactly one office, that's gonna be a huge problem.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  I worked at a company that was acquired by Corporation Service Company (CSC). First, they assigned our team a manager that "specialized in managing remote teams." Our team wasn't "remote", as we all worked in the same office, with cubicles and whiteboards and all the trappings: it was "remote" in the sense that we didn't work at corporate headquarters. The import of this nuance would soon become clear. Management then told us, after moving everyone into a brand new office, that it didn't want any technical work done "remotely." And to aid in the transition? Why, hire a developer located in India, of course! The new owner literally added two genuinely remote people to our team in the name of not being remote. Prior to the acquisition, we all worked within a 50m radius. Apparently, acqui-firing was such a habit for CSC that disgruntled former employees founded National Registered Agents, Inc. (NRAI), which became one of their major competitors. At some point NRAI and CT, the primary of CSC's competitors, were fused together, along with BizFilings, under Wolters Kluwer. I think the current registered agent market share is about 60% CT and 40% CSC. It takes a special kind of management genius to motivate the people you fired into forming a business from scratch to compete with you, take some of your market share, then merge with your archenemy. And the thing that makes all this worse is that a nationwide registered agent business must necessarily have more than 50 offices that are not the corporate headquarters. So some companies hate "remote" so much that they can't even stand to have certain employees working together as a team in a satellite office, one that they have to keep open anyway! (But outsourcing to India is still okay.) Still not the worst-managed company I ever worked for.
maxxxxx 9y ago
That's pretty common hypocrisy. Open offices are great as long as you are not a director or higher. Limiting salary increases is necessary unless you are top management. Any kind of work can be offshored as long as it's not management. And so on.
chrisbennet 9y ago
I imagine that the real reason for IBM's "everyone must work in the office" was to get staff to quit rather than laying them off.
- bhgraham 9y ago
  Not always. They laid off people who were not interested in working in the office fulltime.
- jldugger 9y ago
  And their research even supports the goal: > work-from-home talent tended to be “more engaged, have stronger trust in leadership and much stronger intention to stay.” Stronger intention to stay is a problem if you're trying to shrink the workforce!
- d883kd8 9y ago
  Sounds like a milder version of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-illegal-japan-workers-are-sent-to-the-boredom-room.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  I've mentioned this before, but I think it's pretty clear now that IBM is undergoing a slow-motion, manual liquidation (or winding-up). No big drama, no bankruptcy, just slowly and steadily shedding employees and buying back the stock until the whole thing goes poof.
  - solotronics 9y ago
    there is a massive reorientation to cloud computing services occurring
    - spcelzrd 9y ago
      Top line revenue at IBM is down to 79B from 105B over the last five years.
colmvp 9y ago
> There is only one recipe I know for success, particularly when we are in as much of a battle with Microsoft and the West Coast companies as we are, and that is by bringing great people with the right skills, give them the right tools, give them a mission, make sure they can analyze their results, put them in really creative inspiring locations and set them free. Some people excel just by being in a location with a bunch of highly talented and capable individuals. Others can work mostly on their own and may excel with more authority over their work space to make themselves more conducive to flow and deep work. There are many legit criticisms of remote work and it's not for everyone or every organization, but neither are open office plans, flat structures, open-ended vacation policies, flexible work hours, etc. Personally, I'm able to work and study more deeply and creatively when I'm on my own because I don't have any visual or auditory distractions.
- accountyaccount 9y ago
  Everyone's looking for "the answer" but reality is that you often do different types of work at different times, and different work styles suit them. If you're identifying/brainstorming a problem, I find that in-person is typically superior... this tends to be longer form, and includes more discussion (which is a bit tougher to manage remotely)... but when you're actually working on it, I could not care less about where the team is.
josh_fyi 9y ago
Marissa Mayer did this in Yahoo. In each case it is a desperation measure in a declining company.
pkaye 9y ago
Honestly I don't know anyone would choose to work for IBM unless they absolutely have no other alternatives. They seem to be getting worse and worse for their employees year after year.
nobleach 9y ago
The no-work-from-home mentality is something I wish would die. I've heard form plenty of friends who've been interviewing with tech companies lately, that it's a discouraged practice. I make it a contingency for any job I've considered over the last 5 years. We're all adults, if you are worried that you won't know what I've been up to, you can check my Pull Requests in our source control system. If you worry that communication is an issue, just watch the Slack channels in which I'm involved. I mean, I can come to work and put on my headphones and talk to you via Slack, or do so from my couch at home. The most common excuse I get is that "some bad apples ruined it for the whole bunch". I'm sorry... a multi-billon dollar company isn't kindergarten. It is entirely possible to create a behavior improvement plan for ONE "bad apple". The rest of us big boys and girls can probably handle it. I just switched team at my current job and have started getting the "well, we don't want to abuse it" talk. What??? Abuse? quit treating it like it's some sort of privilege. I work. I use a laptop... which means as long as I have an internet connection and VPN access, I can do it from anywhere! If you're worried you can't get an answer to your question on a moment's notice, try Slacking me sometime. I find this very common with managers that are scared that they are irrelevant. (they may not understand what their employees actually do) So they work hard to micro-manage the details they _do_ understand. It's sad. I'm a pretty good self-starter/motivator, and when I work from home, I typically start an hour earlier. When I'm at my desk in the building, I get distracted all day (whether by requests, or just talking to other employees) When will the tech industry learn?
- dba7dba 9y ago
  I feel all of this no-remote-encouraged is due to ego trip. Nothing boosts your ego more than having 10 people under your management show up in standup meet and pretend to be listening to what you have to say, and than you dismiss them to go work. It doesn't quite have that feel when you are doing that over Slack.
  - rantanplan 9y ago
    This can be alleviated by meeting once a week(if all members are in the same area) or once per couple of months(for more distributed teams). I would be very wary of companies that can't perform because physical attendance is mandatory every single day!
filereaper 9y ago
I'd hazard much of it is due to poor tooling. IBM is still on Notes and Sametime, these tools are fine for small groups i.e less than five but the experience degraded with the size of the group. I'm specifically referring to group conference calls with shared desktop sessions. Email is fine. Generally most of the communication tools were archaic and getting rid of them has been difficult as most current business processes relied on them (ie Notes databases not showing up in Verse) Working remote needs quality tools across the org.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  Notes isn't that bad but if you want a good experience with it you need a fulltime Notes developer/admin.
baursak 9y ago
This seems like a classical case of right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing at a huge institution, multiplied by the author's desire to get a 6-paragraph story out, where the headline is half the size of the story's body. The opposing "hands" in this case are "company's Smarter Workforce branch", whatever that is, and "Chief Marketing Officer" in a message addressed only to his subordinates. But sure, both can be classified as "The IBM", no matter how stretching or misleading that may be.
- whack 9y ago
  People often underestimate the level of schizophrenia in any medium/large corporation. Every single VP/director has his own agenda, his own vision, and his own philosophy. Yelling gotcha when you catch different divisions saying different things, is like shooting fish in a barrel.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
In my short time at IBM I found the company the most conflicted about two issues, 'cloud' and 'remote work'. When we were acquired there were lots of people we encountered who worked from home. Some more effectively than others. We also encountered buildings like the Almaden research center with long narrow hallways with offices on either side. That were apparently 'classic IBM' office space. When I left, more and more people were being asked to work at the office, and the new offices were open plan, quite literally shoulder to shoulder, rows and rows of desks. I felt both choices were untenable for long term stability. And as with most organizations the implementation is always at the manager level and I know that at least one manager had pretty much told their people that folks could work from home if they didn't want to make the long trek into the office, regardless of what the current policy was. So where did that leave you? If left you with the real estate services guys following one set of rules, and managers making up their own rules to preserve morale. Not a recipe for success. I found it very hard to engage the right people to talk about the disconnect.
quotemstr 9y ago
It's really amazing to see companies completely ignore the practices of other successful companies. In my career, I've seen this willful blindness hurt companies over and over again.
mgkimsal 9y ago
Haven't worked 'for' another company in a while, but my recollections jive with the experience of many current colleagues. You're generally expected to be in the office during "working hours", but there isn't a hard "5pm cutoff" time. Someone has an urgent need at 8pm, and you don't answer the call/email/text/whatever, you're dinged as 'not a team player', and will eventually be relegated. You're often expected to be 'on' 24/7 (as in, not always working, but ready/able to work if need be), but also have to be physically at a location during certain hours. "Vacation" time may be the exception, as long as it doesn't interfere too much with everyone else's work schedules. I've seen some counterexamples, but they're rare enough in my circles to be the exception vs the rule.
- Unkechaug 9y ago
  Exactly my experience as well. It's difficult sometimes because a lot of what I do must be done outside of other people's working hours as not to interfere with their productivity. But at the same time, there is an expectation to be available if my assistance is needed throughout the average joe's workday - so there are really no boundaries unless you work at setting them yourself, which depends on your relationship with your managers/customers and company policy.
Mendenhall 9y ago
I can see a fair amount of situations that would be better to have employees on location. That being said I wonder if a part of the "dont work from home" type feelings come from managers/employees who may resent that they have to be on location?
bitmage 9y ago
The classic lowest common denominator manager: "I may not understand what you do, I may not be able to judge your performance, but I can damn well tell if your butt is in your seat by 8 am."
rodionos 9y ago
> where it concluded that work-from-home _talent_ See, that's how words get diluted. If everyone is a talent, we end up with new hyperboles, i.e. 10x developer. If everyone is an associate, where are the employees? Too many chiefs, not enough Indians...
epc 9y ago
IBM did a “back to the field” thing in the 1980s to encourage people to leave the various labs and join field teams. This was back in the no–layoffs era at IBM. About ten years later many of those people got caught out as IBM quickly downsized in 1993–1995. So this isn't the first time IBM has done this sort of thing. When I ran www.ibm.com we had a mix of local (NYC) and remote staff, mostly doing sysadmin tasks, not so much programming. Everyone hung out on our internal IRC channel. We'd do daily checkins and document everything that happened in a Notes db (ugly but the advantage that we could keep a reference copy on our laptops).
Taylor_OD 9y ago
If a company isnt willing to let someone work from home they should be willing to create the same work station in the office. My biggest gripe about being in the office is that I have to use a under powered laptop, company chair, cant control the heat / light situation, someones always moving my plant slightly, depending on the job I may have a office space or it may be a open office plan... Even if I'm slightly less focused when I'm working from home the time that I am focusing on work is 10x more productive due to the environment being set up how I like it.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
IBM's clients should also adopt the same strategy as IBM and do away with IBM's remote offshore developers.
marcgcombi 9y ago
These trends come and go, like the tides. Remember that I said this: the IBM bean counters will publish a study in a couple of years that shows that it is massively expensive to maintain on-premise work sites for knowledge workers.... and they will kick everyone out, again. LOL Lemmings
geodel 9y ago
Many have pointed out contradiction in what IBM saying vs doing. I think these both statements are okay in respective context. Remote working support seems IBM research type result while asking people to work is their current business reality. IBM revenue is declining every quarter for last 5 years and I think lot of remote work jobs in IBM are off-site consulting. Since these people are not at client site they might as well work from home instead of showing up at IBM office. But now those consulting revenues are falling and IBM really needs to bring those people to offices to see where they can be redeployed.
solotronics 9y ago
provide a nice environment like at Facebook or Google and I would be glad to come in.. there are a lot of people still working from home at IBM
- scaryspooky 9y ago
  None of the pictures I've seen of facebook or Google offices provide any motivation to work in the office. They're crowded noise factories to me.
supergeek133 9y ago
The real reason companies do these kinds of policy changes is along the lines of the following (but not limited to): - A legacy style executive comes in and cannot "see" people working therefore they are not working - There is rampant abuse in the model - Productivity is measurably down (e.g., when Best Buy removed work from home they were in talks to be taken private) - People can't get a hold of each other when everyone works from home. Communication issues. When I was working at Best Buy and the policy was rescinded, you had MANY people habitually abusing it. They would block off entire days of their calendar and say "I'm working from home, I don't accept meetings on X day." Usually a Friday, imagine that. It was obvious what people were doing. Some people even drove in with their boat on the trailer and said "I'm working from home after lunch". However, as more and more companies become global, it's harder to enforce "butt in seat". For instance I get up early in the morning to talk to people in CZ, others go home and sit on calls with India teams. Then they're expected to be in the office next morning. That's not a sustainable model. There are many pros and cons to both sides of the argument. I personally tend to find myself more productive in the office than I do at home most days, so I come in. However is it nice to have flexibility? Absolutely. However people have to understand underneath the corporate BS and HR BS, there is likely a real perceived problem that either nobody understands how else to solve, or employees aren't being very honest with themselves that causes this kind of backlash. The last point I'll make, is that some people that work from home all day are just downright impossible to communicate with sometimes. It's hard to have one part of the workforce that works from home, and may be gone for a period of time mix with another side of the same workforce that is at the office for a determined amount of time.

An old friend recently parted ways with IBM after he was asked to relocate from the middle of nowhere to one of their major offices. They offered him minimal relocation, and a minimal COL based raise to move. He did the math, and realized that the cost of living was so high where was being asked to relocated (Almaden), that he'd be better off just letting his wife be the primary breadwinner and living on one income.

srinathrajaram 9y ago
That really sucks! The level of dissonance in this is overwhelming. In March - You need to work shoulder to shoulder "https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-thousands-of-employees-back-to-the-office/" https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... In May - we have a survey and a study and a panel that proves remote working is great! I don't envy the guy in IBM who has to sell Kenexa (https://www.ibm.com/blogs/smarter-workforce/2017/05/making-telework-work-insights-siop-2017/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/smarter-workforce/2017/05/making-t...).
- drewg123 9y ago
  Yeah, it really sucked. He came in as part of an acquisition 7 or 8 years ago, and had been working remote for 10+ years from the same location. His kids were happy in school, his wife was happy in her job, they were involved in the local community. It just didn't make sense for them to move, financially or socially. The odd thing was that for him, this happened about a year ago. I think the edict came down almost exactly one year ago; this article makes it sound more recent.
  - xemdetia 9y ago
    From what I hear it's more of a staged rollout of who they are dragging back to the office. So waves of people are being disrupted and often making the obvious choice that seeking other employment is the best option. Or worse people that have a local office but their 'team' is based far enough away that it still counts as relocate or die.
    - zeveb 9y ago
      IBM has been dragging folks back to the office since 2009 (IIRC). They're not wrong about the benefits of colocation; it's just that they want the company to receive those benefits without compensating employees whatsoever.
      - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        Exactly. Look, if you already offer work from home, forget about taking it away. That will just piss people off, make people unhappy, hate management, and be less productive.
  - bhgraham 9y ago
    Yeah I was given the same choice around last March.

squozzer 9y ago

It's called "eating your own dog food" for a reason. What reason that is in this case, I have no idea.

johnward 9y ago
I'm pretty sure the reason is Agile. They don't think it's possible unless you are face to face at a standup. Also, moving people back to offices is a way to thin the herd without firing people.

derwiki 9y ago

> Leaning on insights from the public sector and the world of academia, the panelists came to the revelation that “teleworking works, and that associated challenges can be managed with careful planning and communication.” Efficient teleworking can be had for healthy orgs that practice careful planning and communication. But that does not imply IBM has healthy orgs that practice careful planning and communication.

archildress 9y ago

I work in a much more traditional industry than IBM, but I've recently been humored by management's resistance to remote work while hiring personnel in India to handle the "transactional" work.

mysterydip 9y ago
Maybe people should start telling management, "It's not working remotely, it's localized offshoring!"
- VLM 9y ago
  I like the argument that they trust me to work on call, in fact they demand it, and all on call work is done remotely over the VPN. So just think of it as being on call during the day. It also helps if you can ease into flex time. You know I'm almost never here on Friday, but if you need me I always come thru remotely? Yeah, its gonna be like that Mon-Thur now too. It helps if all your coworkers work at other offices around the country. If you have a position where you mostly work with other teams all over the country, remote is perfect. I have three main "internal customers" each about 1000 miles apart. I don't even know what planet some of my coworkers are on much less if they're in an official office or not. If you have a position where you mostly work with a local team that meets in exactly one office, that's gonna be a huge problem.
logfromblammo 9y ago
I worked at a company that was acquired by Corporation Service Company (CSC). First, they assigned our team a manager that "specialized in managing remote teams." Our team wasn't "remote", as we all worked in the same office, with cubicles and whiteboards and all the trappings: it was "remote" in the sense that we didn't work at corporate headquarters. The import of this nuance would soon become clear. Management then told us, after moving everyone into a brand new office, that it didn't want any technical work done "remotely." And to aid in the transition? Why, hire a developer located in India, of course! The new owner literally added two genuinely remote people to our team in the name of not being remote. Prior to the acquisition, we all worked within a 50m radius. Apparently, acqui-firing was such a habit for CSC that disgruntled former employees founded National Registered Agents, Inc. (NRAI), which became one of their major competitors. At some point NRAI and CT, the primary of CSC's competitors, were fused together, along with BizFilings, under Wolters Kluwer. I think the current registered agent market share is about 60% CT and 40% CSC. It takes a special kind of management genius to motivate the people you fired into forming a business from scratch to compete with you, take some of your market share, then merge with your archenemy. And the thing that makes all this worse is that a nationwide registered agent business must necessarily have more than 50 offices that are not the corporate headquarters. So some companies hate "remote" so much that they can't even stand to have certain employees working together as a team in a satellite office, one that they have to keep open anyway! (But outsourcing to India is still okay.) Still not the worst-managed company I ever worked for.

maxxxxx 9y ago

That's pretty common hypocrisy. Open offices are great as long as you are not a director or higher. Limiting salary increases is necessary unless you are top management. Any kind of work can be offshored as long as it's not management. And so on.

chrisbennet 9y ago

I imagine that the real reason for IBM's "everyone must work in the office" was to get staff to quit rather than laying them off.

bhgraham 9y ago
Not always. They laid off people who were not interested in working in the office fulltime.
jldugger 9y ago
And their research even supports the goal: > work-from-home talent tended to be “more engaged, have stronger trust in leadership and much stronger intention to stay.” Stronger intention to stay is a problem if you're trying to shrink the workforce!
d883kd8 9y ago
Sounds like a milder version of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-illegal-japan-workers-are-sent-to-the-boredom-room.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...
Analemma_ 9y ago
I've mentioned this before, but I think it's pretty clear now that IBM is undergoing a slow-motion, manual liquidation (or winding-up). No big drama, no bankruptcy, just slowly and steadily shedding employees and buying back the stock until the whole thing goes poof.
- solotronics 9y ago
  there is a massive reorientation to cloud computing services occurring
  - spcelzrd 9y ago
    Top line revenue at IBM is down to 79B from 105B over the last five years.

colmvp 9y ago

> There is only one recipe I know for success, particularly when we are in as much of a battle with Microsoft and the West Coast companies as we are, and that is by bringing great people with the right skills, give them the right tools, give them a mission, make sure they can analyze their results, put them in really creative inspiring locations and set them free. Some people excel just by being in a location with a bunch of highly talented and capable individuals. Others can work mostly on their own and may excel with more authority over their work space to make themselves more conducive to flow and deep work. There are many legit criticisms of remote work and it's not for everyone or every organization, but neither are open office plans, flat structures, open-ended vacation policies, flexible work hours, etc. Personally, I'm able to work and study more deeply and creatively when I'm on my own because I don't have any visual or auditory distractions.

accountyaccount 9y ago
Everyone's looking for "the answer" but reality is that you often do different types of work at different times, and different work styles suit them. If you're identifying/brainstorming a problem, I find that in-person is typically superior... this tends to be longer form, and includes more discussion (which is a bit tougher to manage remotely)... but when you're actually working on it, I could not care less about where the team is.

josh_fyi 9y ago

Marissa Mayer did this in Yahoo. In each case it is a desperation measure in a declining company.

pkaye 9y ago

Honestly I don't know anyone would choose to work for IBM unless they absolutely have no other alternatives. They seem to be getting worse and worse for their employees year after year.

nobleach 9y ago

The no-work-from-home mentality is something I wish would die. I've heard form plenty of friends who've been interviewing with tech companies lately, that it's a discouraged practice. I make it a contingency for any job I've considered over the last 5 years. We're all adults, if you are worried that you won't know what I've been up to, you can check my Pull Requests in our source control system. If you worry that communication is an issue, just watch the Slack channels in which I'm involved. I mean, I can come to work and put on my headphones and talk to you via Slack, or do so from my couch at home. The most common excuse I get is that "some bad apples ruined it for the whole bunch". I'm sorry... a multi-billon dollar company isn't kindergarten. It is entirely possible to create a behavior improvement plan for ONE "bad apple". The rest of us big boys and girls can probably handle it. I just switched team at my current job and have started getting the "well, we don't want to abuse it" talk. What??? Abuse? quit treating it like it's some sort of privilege. I work. I use a laptop... which means as long as I have an internet connection and VPN access, I can do it from anywhere! If you're worried you can't get an answer to your question on a moment's notice, try Slacking me sometime. I find this very common with managers that are scared that they are irrelevant. (they may not understand what their employees actually do) So they work hard to micro-manage the details they _do_ understand. It's sad. I'm a pretty good self-starter/motivator, and when I work from home, I typically start an hour earlier. When I'm at my desk in the building, I get distracted all day (whether by requests, or just talking to other employees) When will the tech industry learn?

dba7dba 9y ago
I feel all of this no-remote-encouraged is due to ego trip. Nothing boosts your ego more than having 10 people under your management show up in standup meet and pretend to be listening to what you have to say, and than you dismiss them to go work. It doesn't quite have that feel when you are doing that over Slack.
- rantanplan 9y ago
  This can be alleviated by meeting once a week(if all members are in the same area) or once per couple of months(for more distributed teams). I would be very wary of companies that can't perform because physical attendance is mandatory every single day!

filereaper 9y ago

I'd hazard much of it is due to poor tooling. IBM is still on Notes and Sametime, these tools are fine for small groups i.e less than five but the experience degraded with the size of the group. I'm specifically referring to group conference calls with shared desktop sessions. Email is fine. Generally most of the communication tools were archaic and getting rid of them has been difficult as most current business processes relied on them (ie Notes databases not showing up in Verse) Working remote needs quality tools across the org.

mschuster91 9y ago
Notes isn't that bad but if you want a good experience with it you need a fulltime Notes developer/admin.

baursak 9y ago

This seems like a classical case of right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing at a huge institution, multiplied by the author's desire to get a 6-paragraph story out, where the headline is half the size of the story's body. The opposing "hands" in this case are "company's Smarter Workforce branch", whatever that is, and "Chief Marketing Officer" in a message addressed only to his subordinates. But sure, both can be classified as "The IBM", no matter how stretching or misleading that may be.

whack 9y ago
People often underestimate the level of schizophrenia in any medium/large corporation. Every single VP/director has his own agenda, his own vision, and his own philosophy. Yelling gotcha when you catch different divisions saying different things, is like shooting fish in a barrel.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

In my short time at IBM I found the company the most conflicted about two issues, 'cloud' and 'remote work'. When we were acquired there were lots of people we encountered who worked from home. Some more effectively than others. We also encountered buildings like the Almaden research center with long narrow hallways with offices on either side. That were apparently 'classic IBM' office space. When I left, more and more people were being asked to work at the office, and the new offices were open plan, quite literally shoulder to shoulder, rows and rows of desks. I felt both choices were untenable for long term stability. And as with most organizations the implementation is always at the manager level and I know that at least one manager had pretty much told their people that folks could work from home if they didn't want to make the long trek into the office, regardless of what the current policy was. So where did that leave you? If left you with the real estate services guys following one set of rules, and managers making up their own rules to preserve morale. Not a recipe for success. I found it very hard to engage the right people to talk about the disconnect.

quotemstr 9y ago

It's really amazing to see companies completely ignore the practices of other successful companies. In my career, I've seen this willful blindness hurt companies over and over again.

mgkimsal 9y ago

Haven't worked 'for' another company in a while, but my recollections jive with the experience of many current colleagues. You're generally expected to be in the office during "working hours", but there isn't a hard "5pm cutoff" time. Someone has an urgent need at 8pm, and you don't answer the call/email/text/whatever, you're dinged as 'not a team player', and will eventually be relegated. You're often expected to be 'on' 24/7 (as in, not always working, but ready/able to work if need be), but also have to be physically at a location during certain hours. "Vacation" time may be the exception, as long as it doesn't interfere too much with everyone else's work schedules. I've seen some counterexamples, but they're rare enough in my circles to be the exception vs the rule.

Unkechaug 9y ago
Exactly my experience as well. It's difficult sometimes because a lot of what I do must be done outside of other people's working hours as not to interfere with their productivity. But at the same time, there is an expectation to be available if my assistance is needed throughout the average joe's workday - so there are really no boundaries unless you work at setting them yourself, which depends on your relationship with your managers/customers and company policy.

Mendenhall 9y ago

I can see a fair amount of situations that would be better to have employees on location. That being said I wonder if a part of the "dont work from home" type feelings come from managers/employees who may resent that they have to be on location?

bitmage 9y ago

The classic lowest common denominator manager: "I may not understand what you do, I may not be able to judge your performance, but I can damn well tell if your butt is in your seat by 8 am."

rodionos 9y ago

> where it concluded that work-from-home _talent_ See, that's how words get diluted. If everyone is a talent, we end up with new hyperboles, i.e. 10x developer. If everyone is an associate, where are the employees? Too many chiefs, not enough Indians...

epc 9y ago

IBM did a “back to the field” thing in the 1980s to encourage people to leave the various labs and join field teams. This was back in the no–layoffs era at IBM. About ten years later many of those people got caught out as IBM quickly downsized in 1993–1995. So this isn't the first time IBM has done this sort of thing. When I ran www.ibm.com we had a mix of local (NYC) and remote staff, mostly doing sysadmin tasks, not so much programming. Everyone hung out on our internal IRC channel. We'd do daily checkins and document everything that happened in a Notes db (ugly but the advantage that we could keep a reference copy on our laptops).

Taylor_OD 9y ago

If a company isnt willing to let someone work from home they should be willing to create the same work station in the office. My biggest gripe about being in the office is that I have to use a under powered laptop, company chair, cant control the heat / light situation, someones always moving my plant slightly, depending on the job I may have a office space or it may be a open office plan... Even if I'm slightly less focused when I'm working from home the time that I am focusing on work is 10x more productive due to the environment being set up how I like it.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

IBM's clients should also adopt the same strategy as IBM and do away with IBM's remote offshore developers.

marcgcombi 9y ago

These trends come and go, like the tides. Remember that I said this: the IBM bean counters will publish a study in a couple of years that shows that it is massively expensive to maintain on-premise work sites for knowledge workers.... and they will kick everyone out, again. LOL Lemmings

geodel 9y ago

Many have pointed out contradiction in what IBM saying vs doing. I think these both statements are okay in respective context. Remote working support seems IBM research type result while asking people to work is their current business reality. IBM revenue is declining every quarter for last 5 years and I think lot of remote work jobs in IBM are off-site consulting. Since these people are not at client site they might as well work from home instead of showing up at IBM office. But now those consulting revenues are falling and IBM really needs to bring those people to offices to see where they can be redeployed.

solotronics 9y ago

provide a nice environment like at Facebook or Google and I would be glad to come in.. there are a lot of people still working from home at IBM

scaryspooky 9y ago
None of the pictures I've seen of facebook or Google offices provide any motivation to work in the office. They're crowded noise factories to me.

supergeek133 9y ago

The real reason companies do these kinds of policy changes is along the lines of the following (but not limited to): - A legacy style executive comes in and cannot "see" people working therefore they are not working - There is rampant abuse in the model - Productivity is measurably down (e.g., when Best Buy removed work from home they were in talks to be taken private) - People can't get a hold of each other when everyone works from home. Communication issues. When I was working at Best Buy and the policy was rescinded, you had MANY people habitually abusing it. They would block off entire days of their calendar and say "I'm working from home, I don't accept meetings on X day." Usually a Friday, imagine that. It was obvious what people were doing. Some people even drove in with their boat on the trailer and said "I'm working from home after lunch". However, as more and more companies become global, it's harder to enforce "butt in seat". For instance I get up early in the morning to talk to people in CZ, others go home and sit on calls with India teams. Then they're expected to be in the office next morning. That's not a sustainable model. There are many pros and cons to both sides of the argument. I personally tend to find myself more productive in the office than I do at home most days, so I come in. However is it nice to have flexibility? Absolutely. However people have to understand underneath the corporate BS and HR BS, there is likely a real perceived problem that either nobody understands how else to solve, or employees aren't being very honest with themselves that causes this kind of backlash. The last point I'll make, is that some people that work from home all day are just downright impossible to communicate with sometimes. It's hard to have one part of the workforce that works from home, and may be gone for a period of time mix with another side of the same workforce that is at the office for a determined amount of time.