
IBM says remote working is great after forcing employees to work from office - srinathrajaram
https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/05/08/ibm-remote-working-panel/#.tnw_fGon9xiN
======
nobleach
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?

~~~
eksemplar
We've measured productivity of remote work compared to in house work. I work
in the public sector so it's mainly not programming, but caseworking and
similar. We've found that productivity is way down when people work at home,
we've however also found that allowing people to slack once in a while
increases their overall performance.

The optimal results come from people working mainly at the office. Now this
may be completely different for development houses, our coders are some of the
most productive when working remote, IT in general is below average though.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
It's very cool that you guys actually gathered some data on the topic.

I wonder how much your conclusions would hold for non-public-sector jobs.

AFAIK it's typically harder to fire a public-sector worker for under-
performance, than in the private sector. Perhaps that either (a) adds to the
temptation to goof around at home, or (b) attracts the kinds of workers who
were always more apt to goof around, given the opportunity.

~~~
pc86
I do a lot of work with public-sector employees. I always thought they were
lazy (which I think is a fairly common feeling throughout the private sector).
Some are, of course. But unfortunately the problem is not one of drive but of
competence. _In technology specifically_ , the public-sector employees I've
worked with simply do not have the skills of a private-sector employee with
similar responsibilities/experience. I don't know if it's the lower salary or
what but I can count on one hand the number of technical public-sector
employees who would be able to have a similarly-titled position in any of the
private sector companies I've worked for.

~~~
mschuster91
Main problem is that all the high-quality tech talent is vacuumed up by the
private sector. For what it's worth, I once worked at the Munich government
and since a couple years in the private sector. In Munich, BMW, Microsoft and
the various suppliers for BMW are the most likely target for fresh university
graduates, mainly due to the prestige and in the case of BMW the enormous pay.

Those who end up in public sector usually are those who value the job security
or do it out of dedication. Which doesn't mean they're bad at their job, in my
experience it was the exact opposite, but the government sector is waaaaay
understaffed, and pay can't be risen to private-sector levels because of rigid
union agreements.

Also, the competence problems are related more to regulations... why spend
your time e.g. learning Docker when you're happy enough you can finally use
Ubuntu instead of RHEL? So basically unless you lesrn it in your time off
there's no motivation to learn new stuff because it will be outdated when
regulation molasses finally catches up.

------
drewg123
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
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-tho...](https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-
pioneer-is-calling-thousands-of-employees-back-to-the-office/")

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-t...](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/smarter-
workforce/2017/05/making-telework-work-insights-siop-2017/)).

~~~
drewg123
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
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
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
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.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

------
chrisbennet
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.

~~~
Analemma_
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
there is a massive reorientation to cloud computing services occurring

~~~
gaius
What does that actually mean tho'? IBM's churn is such that they have to sell
people with 1-2 years experience as "cloud experts". Any real company i.e. not
a bodyshop can easily hire people with 3-5 or more years, for waaayyyy less
than IBM's hourly billing rate. IBM made sense when you needed 6 months of
time from an engineer with 20-30 years COBOL expertise and a direct line to
the hardware snd OS engineers. The only way they make sense now is as a TUPE
vehicle and that's a legal not a technical service...

------
baursak
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
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.

------
colmvp
> 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
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.

------
archildress
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.

~~~
logfromblammo
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.

~~~
archildress
Good read. This whole thing made me chuckle.

~~~
logfromblammo
My reaction to it is sort of a bitter, FML, hollow laughter.

That's just part of the story that taught me that it doesn't matter how much
you like your job, or how good you are at doing it, if some rich asshole can
buy it and throw it into the garbage--or move it beyond your reach, or give it
to a cousin, or alter it beyond recognition. That was the last job that I
actually _liked_.

Subsequent stories have only reinforced the lesson. Those incidents are why,
despite the glaring and obvious flaws of labor unions, I support unions for
technical skilled labor unconditionally and without hesitation.

It isn't even about money. I really would have liked to be able to tell the
boss at my last job that packing the entire development team and test team
around the walls of his corner office while everyone takes turns justifying
their existence for a total of at least 45 minutes daily, starting at 8:45 AM,
is not a "stand-up meeting". It's not even a status meeting. It's a pointless
show of dominance.

I would really like to be able to, if not stop, at least _discourage_ such
idiotic behavior, rather than just looking for other jobs and rolling the dice
_yet again_ on a different manager that might possibly be less like the high
priest of a cargo cult. It would have been nice if voicing my concerns did not
paint a target on my back.

------
filereaper
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
Notes isn't that bad but if you want a good experience with it you need a
fulltime Notes developer/admin.

------
mgkimsal
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
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.

------
Taylor_OD
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.

------
bitmage
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."

------
derwiki
> 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.

------
supergeek133
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.

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

------
epc
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).

------
pkaye
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.

------
maxxxxx
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.

------
geodel
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.

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

------
Mendenhall
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?

------
quotemstr
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.

------
solotronics
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
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.

------
marcgcombi
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

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

~~~
johnward
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.

------
rodionos
> 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...

