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“Signify forces people to work in the office”

• SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  My last employer forced all of us to return to the office - it reversed the policy, only after a significant exodus of talent. I was one of those, but far from the most difficult to replace.
  • laughingpine 5y ago
    My current employer is in the process of making this mistake, and it feels awful. We've already started losing some good folks.
    • jleyank 5y ago
      Are they showing some sign of regretting the loss, or operating on the premise that the good workers are in the office and the problem children are going away? If it’s the latter, then talent is fungible and they’ll just find more.
      • justin_oaks 5y ago
        I think part of the problem is that it's hard to measure the productivity of individual workers and even harder to link that to specific outcomes. Thus if all the best workers are replaced and now we have higher system failures, more bugs, and slower project releases, then management can choose to believe that those problems are unrelated to the decision that caused people to leave. Only the lowest members of the team understand the loss in real terms... and who wants their thoughts and opinions on things?
      • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
        There's a definite internal disagreement over how to see it. A lot of managers are highly extraverted and will justify any cost to the business if it lets them work in the environment they prefer. Others had looked at productivity and seen it increase over the same time period. In my opinion the former group won a Pyrrhic victory but the war is still ongoing.
    • toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Good folks going to better employers though.
    • justin_oaks 5y ago
      It seems strange to me when management makes mistakes like this. It's reminiscent of requiring people to move when the company moves office locations, or offering people money to volunteer to be laid off. In each of those cases, the ones who are most fearful for their jobs are often the least competent who know they'll have a hard time getting a new job. The highest skilled folks have no problem walking away because they know they can get another job in no time. I guess it's the management delusion that each employee is fungible and can be replaced with a new employee without any loss of productivity.
      • DiggyJohnson 5y ago
        I’m at a company that still does all of those things. Still virtual, though!
      • tensor 5y ago
        I don't think managers generally think that there is no loss of productivity when you have churn. Loss of productivity due to churn is a very well known phenomenon. But it's also true that almost any employee can be replaced, and if they can't you should probably fix your org structure or processes so that they can be. Having single employee dependencies is one of the worst scenarios for organization robustness, and that includes people at the C-level. The old adage that a good manager should aim to make themselves replaceable has some merit. All that said, I think people often incorrectly assume that having people in an office will yield productivity gains. I don't know of any research that definitively shows that to be true, and good management should be doing result based performance management not ass in seat performance management anyways. Despite this, I still routinely meeting high level people in companies who insist that assess in seats somehow give more productivity. I don't buy that hypothesis.
        • rapind 5y ago
          This isn’t about “single” employee dependency though, companies are seeing significant attrition due to these policies. There’s no way to know this is safe and it’s probably hard to estimate costs. Even in an ideal configuration where your employees are basically redundant raid drives (and yes you need to pay a lot for this redundancy which I doubt most employers do), you generally don’t want to lost too many at once, and even if you survive you still have high costs associated with replacement (training, hiring, fit, etc) It might still be the best long term decision in some cases, but man, you better be making this decision based on more than a hunch.
• pie_flavor 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20220323181519/https://bits-chips.nl/artikel/signify-forces-people-to-work-in-the-office/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220323181519/https://bits-chip...
• politician 5y ago
  Is it pronounced “sig-nif-eye” or “sign-if-eye”? If they make signs, I’d imagine it’d be cool to use the latter. The site doesn’t load, so I don’t know what they do.
  • Nullabillity 5y ago
    Looks like they're the Philips Hue people.
    • ragnarok123 5y ago
      Yep. This is a 5bln lighting company which used to be known as Philips Lighting. Unlike their Hue product, their policy to work is not innovative. Good luck hiring talent :)
• rlewkov 5y ago
  My (unnamed) employer does too unless you live greater than a certain distance from the office. Have had several high-caliber engineers quit. They had reqs out for their replacements within a week. It sucks but their company their rules.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    My wife’s company did this, and then backpedaled after a bunch of good people quit. I would like to talk to the executives making these boneheaded decisions. What is going through your head when you decide to arbitrarily give some people the benefit of working from home and forcing some to come to the office as a function of where their current home address happens to be?
    • rlewkov 5y ago
      Their general theme is that we, as a company, are more productive if working collaboratively together. The CEO has been asked many times to change policy and has not. At this point I somewhat think it's more "because I said so". I'm sure the distance from office that will allow you to work from home was decided in a meeting and published in someone's TPS report.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I do not think there is anything boneheaded with executives calling everyone into the office, if they think that is what will help them. The stupid part is pissing off some or much of your team by giving the benefit of working from home to those who happen to live in a certain location.
        • rlewkov 5y ago
          I haven't heard anyone complain that Fred can work from home because he lives more than X miles away from the office. Everyone, at least it seems to me, is OK with distance being used to determine if someone is allowed to work at home. There may be people who are irked about it but they aren't particularly vocal. I think it's more that company X just down the road allows it so why not us.
• nickff 5y ago
  What is "a responsible mix of working from home and ‘on the job.’"? I don't understand how working in an office is 'irresponsible'. My guess is that the employer is concerned about 'shirking', which tends to be prevalent in union-protected positions.
• lkrubner 5y ago
  This is a complex issue, but if we were to try to simplify it a bit, we could say: "Any job that can be done from home can also be done from India or Brazil." Sometimes I say this and people say "India is a different culture and it is a different time zone." Well, okay, let's say that's true, there is still Brazil, which is only one time zone away from New York City. Brazil has a Western culture, and thanks to a recent political crisis its currency devalued so it now seems like a low cost place to outsource work. Again, this is a complex subject, but I've been surprised by the number of workers in New York City who don't seem to get the basic underlying facts of the situation. Most of the work that can be outsourced will be outsourced, so most of the work that remains in the USA is work that needs to be done at the office. I've often heard workers say "Why should it matter if I'm at the office? All that matters is whether I get my work done. I should be judged on that and that alone." Yes, for sure, that applies to all of the situations where the work can be easily defined, and some concept of "quality" is easy to apply. However, the work that can be easily defined, to the point that it can be written down in a contract, is also the work that is easiest to outsource. There is a famous economist named Coase who wrote a famous thesis on this very subject. He asked the question, why do employees exist? That is, why isn't everyone an independent agent, a corporation of one? He concluded that there is a lot of work that is not easy to define, not easy to write down, and where "quality" is multivariate and composed of intangibles -- in all such cases it is better to hire an employee than outsource the work to another company. But the vagueness of definition that leads to the existence of employees also makes it difficult to allow work-from-home, for all of the same reasons. Of course, in between outsourcing and work-from-office there are infinite shades of gray, which can be paid a sliding scale of values. That is, there is some work that can be done from home, where the company is willing to pay more than they would pay for outsourcing and less than they would pay for in-office work. There is some middle ground. And that is what I've been seeing in New York City this year. I've seen some companies pay as much as $30,000 extra to get people back into the office. What is surprising is that most of my work-from-home friends don't see this as a pay cut. As the old saying goes "workers fear losses more than they value gains." Since their salary is not being cut, they don't feel like they've suffered a pay cut. But if your peers get pay raises and you don't, I'd say that is something like a pay cut. And if you don't see it that way this year, you might see it after a few years. Because your peer who gets an extra $30k this is going to be making 100k more than you in about 4 or 5 years. If the big pay raises go to people who work in the office, then a gap will open between those who work in an office and those who work from home. Again, the fundamental economic issue is this: people who work from home are competing directly with folks in India, Romania, Vietnam, and Brazil, in a way that folks who work in an office are not. The model that I'm seeing this year in New York City is something like "leadership and top workers in the office, less important workers can work from home." Many workers are grateful to be able to work from home -- they regard this as an enormous perk. Indeed, they forego $30k and considered themselves better off for it. But I wonder, where will this new model take us in 5 years? I think for many workers, if they don't go to the office, they are self-selecting themselves from any future leadership roles. Which is fine, if they just want a good paying job, and they don't aim for a future leadership role. But for folks who do aim for future leadership roles, I think working in an office will remain mandatory. And even for those not aiming for leadership roles, the issue remains, as the economist Coase would say, can your work be defined so clearly that your manager can say with certainty that you are contributing all that you should be contributing? If your work is that cut-and-dry, then your work can be outsourced. And if your work is not that cut-and-dry, then you can't really work from home on a regular basis.
• ragnarok123 5y ago
  I used to work at this company. The ceo is totally mental and mistrusts his employees to be productive remotely. Company is desperately in need of new top leadership. This guy even rehired Nissan’s deranged and corrupt CIO, who is renowned for reorganizing with total disregard for people.
• ykevinator2 5y ago
  I don't like the language here. It's a business it's not summer camp. "Force" is so entitled.