> Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the president of the Society for Human Resource Management, told BI that as more organizations have called workers back to the office, it's become clear that many employees didn't heed warnings that remote work was not here to stay.
It's not the employees fault if they trusted the company wouldn't screw up home office, all these companies made employees believe they could have better working conditions, until they forced everyone to go back to the office.
I don't blame the employees but the employer for making broken promises and manipulating their employees into thinking the company is better than the competitors.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the president of the Society for Human Resource Management, a spokesman for corporations, is full of shit if you read his statements from the employee's perspective. This guy "is not your attorney" to put it politely.
RTO is a tool used to cause no-severance departures of workers who are expensive to fire but can be replaced by cheaper workforce, in a way that will go unnoticed to investors during the next quarter.
EDIT: this topic was just demoted from 1st to 5th page, with 45 points after 2 hours of being posted. No more fresh comments under such moderation.
> RTO is a tool used to cause no-severance departures of workers who are expensive to fire but can be replaced by cheaper workforce, in a way that will go unnoticed to investors during the next quarter.
Yep. I seem to recall this happening well before COVID, like at IBM (which was a pioneer for remote work) and Yahoo.
> "To harness this energy and grow skills, we believe our sales teams need to be together in the office," the memo added. "Additionally, our data shows that sales teams are more productive when onsite."
I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes.
> I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes.
They never share the data. The data is "management wants it that way." I manage a completely remote team, I couldn't care less if they were in person, they work fantastically this way.
Exactly. I get just as much from my people if not more when they're remote because I hire good people with good work ethics. They're responsible people who do the jobs I trust them to do. This is just control-fetish appeasement.
Before I got into information systems, I spent about a decade in sales. As someone who's been on both sides of the ball, sales teams absolutely do not need to be in the office. Maybe for quarterly or managerial meetings, but the highest performing sales people and teams I knew where given free reign to do their thing as long as they were hitting their quotas. If you weren't hitting your numbers, then yeah, managers would lean on you to be in the office and on the phone building your pipeline and demonstrating you weren't out on the golf course doing nothing.
Its a total myth that sales people need to be in the office.
I used to sit next to the guy who made cold calls all day long. There was no part of that job he couldn’t have done absolutely anywhere else. Also, massive, massive respect for anybody with the constitution to do that work. It was hour after hour of “no.”
I believe. Because I know companies like this have almost never spent resources to attempt to improve WFH environment.
Remote work is hard, you need technology, culture, and people all working together to make it efficient. You can't just buy a Slack/Zoom license and expect to suddenly have a productive remote work environment. On the other side, they probably have spent decades to improve physical offices, meeting rooms, desks, seats, lights, it's not a surprise that probably every corner of the space was designed for helping people work better. When they say "we believe RTO is better", it's difficult for me to argue, because of course you can believe one way is better than the other since you didn't really try the other!
I wish these companies just find a different way to lie. It's not "we tried and it didn't work". No, you didn't try at all, because leadership does not care or too lazy to change for themselves.
Why would they? Quoting imaginary data is a plausible explanation to all interested parties. They don't need to prove anything to employees - just make them leave ALREADY. This immediately shows spending decrease to investors and makes them happy.
Quality decrease is a problem they won't have to explain for the next 2 quarters.
EDIT: this topic was just demoted from 1st to 5th page, with 45 points after 2 hours of being posted. No more fresh comments under such moderation.
They never do. I’ve heard that Amazon’s data from internal surveys showed a productivity increase from remote work compared to either hybrid or in office.
It's not clear to me how you can be a full-time employee and be doing full-time child care. I understand the need for schedule flexibility, but if going back to the office means you need to find child care it seems to suggest some of these people weren't really working full time on those days.
- kids do remote school for whatever reason. This works when parent is at home, but not if parent is at the office.
- kids are < age when it's okay to leave them at home, but > age when it's okay for them to walk home from school.
- Have to be at work at 9, school drop-off starts at 8:35. School is 45 minutes from the office.
There are a lot of ways people organize their lives.
The cool thing about sales teams is you don't have to micromanage them in the office as they are one of the few teams in the company where results are unambiguous.
If you are a divorced parent with shared custody, this can be challenging if you live in another town or even in the same town due to how they draw school boundaries. The child can only take the bus that is tied to the custodial parent's address so the other parent is on the hook for transportation to/from school.
These are all legitimate but I found my self a bit bewildered that the concept of a school bus is absent entirely from the apparent thought process, given I rode the bus for the vast majority of my primary and secondary schooling
My kids start school at 8:40 and the train to work leaves at 8:54, meaning that if everything goes perfectly (no disasters at dropoff, train on time, I get the folding bike unfolded quickly and ride like hell, though I like that part) I get to the office at 9:27. I don't think it would be physically possible for me to do a 9:00 AM start time.
you don't think it's physically possible to drop your kids off at school early? The school doors are locked until 8:39am and there are zombies and werewolves patrolling outside making entering the building early, or waiting outside physically impossible?
Like it get that remote work is wayyyyyyyyy better and RTO sucks, but let's not make up lies
In some parts of the country, parents are arrested for child abandonment for leaving children unattended (that's the situation outside at the school before the doors are open).
Depending on when you have to leave for your commute, the doors may well be locked. And doors being unlocked does not mean you are allowed to leave your child there without ramifications. Again -- leaving a child in a school building without agreed-upon supervision is still a clear display of negligence.
> you don't think it's physically possible to drop your kids off at school early? The school doors are locked until 8:39am and there are zombies and werewolves patrolling outside making entering the building early, or waiting outside physically impossible?
What the hell does "physically possible" have to do with anything? Did you ever go to school? The doors may not be locked, but unless the school has some kind of defined pre-care program, they're not ready to take care of random kids dropping in early. That's why they have a start time.
My kids' school has a 20 minute drop off window. They have an pre-care option, but you have to sign up for it (and pay) because they have to juggle staffing levels. You can't just physically dump your kid outside the door and leave because you'd like to.
This may be easier for you understand: A store opens at 9AM, but you're available at 8AM and have to be in the office at 9AM. Can you just drop in at 8AM to get your shopping done? No, if the employees are even there, they're busy with "getting ready for the day" tasks. Same thing goes with schools.
Do you think the teachers live at the school? There's going to be a time when they're just unable to accept kids. I would presume that 8:40 is the earliest that parent can drop off and the school actually starts the lessons a little bit later.
As a parent in the Houston Independent School district, one of the recent changes made by the state-appointed superintendent (we were taken over recently) was to fire all the bus drivers and rehire as contractors. The result is that elementary and middle school are combined, bus stops are up to 3 miles from home address, and bus trips are often in excess of 2 hours (for what should be ~20 minute drives). I also took the bus all growing up, but I walked a few blocks to my bus, and the route was only about 50% longer than driving directly.
Sadly, while we are all used to Texas state government hostility to public goods, even in my home state of Maryland, apparently bus trip lengths have now doubled. In an era of declining public investment, it's apparently easier to save money on non-teacher staffs...
If you think in systems, you can see the python squeezing everywhere: companies squeezing for profits as labor costs increase due to structural demographics and the cost of money has increased substantially from low or zero rates, public investment being squeezed because taxes won't go up to pay for teachers and ancillary staff (1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to retain teachers [1] [2]), etc. I have seen pay for school bus drivers in fairly standard COL areas approach $25-$30/hr. That is what it takes to put people behind the wheel for those jobs now.
It's a natural experiment to behold as a curious scholar of systems, but also deeply disappointing to watch as Rome does not burn, but fades out in various ways. We could make better choices; we choose not to at scale.
> I have seen pay for school bus drivers in fairly standard COL areas approach $25-$30/hr. That is what it takes to put people behind the wheel for those jobs now.
Per FRED[1], median personal income in 2023 was ~$21/hr. Per ADP's most recent survey[2], median pay for people who did not change jobs was ~$29/hr.
Given that context, it is not surprising that the pool of people who can qualify for these jobs (no criminal record, drug screen, etc.) and who want them also demand to be paid near the median income.
(You of course know this, but I want to contribute this data point for the discussion.)
> We could make better choices; we choose not to at scale.
Honestly, this is the American Way. One day our luck will run out and we will fail or be forced to make better choices.
Also a bus/train rider in my youth (from 6 years old no less) but today it's a bit different. I live in a very safe rural part of the US but even here the school busses aren't entirely safe for kids (bullying, theft) so we ended up driving our kids after a few months of trying the bus. In addition the busses only run to school hours so if the kids attend any kind of after school activity, which turns out to be the case most days...no bus.
It doesn't matter that the 9-year-old comes home on a bus vs walking. They still are not allowed to stay at home by themselves for hours after school every day, even if they take the bus.
It's not the conveyance, it's that the parent is no longer on the premises at all.
I simply chose walking because most of the kids in our neighborhood walk to school.
My district called bus service due to low ridership. The majority of parents in my district are single income and so one parent drives their kids to school every day. It's just another factor forcing low income families out of the neighborhoods.
At least by me you have to be more than 1.5miles from the school to get a bus - that's a half hour walk! Doable certainly, but not fun, especially in the winter - or worse, when it's hot!
And teens need to live even farther from their school to qualify for a bus, but teens don't walk any faster than non teens. Most kids don't really want to spend the better part of an hour each way going to/from school.
I used to occasionally walk home from school in high school, about 3 miles. Not very many sidewalks as it was a semi-rural area (there were some in town but only for like 1/3rd of the walk), and I had to walk across a highway overpass, which was a bit sketchy to do on foot.
I would beat the bus when I did so, but only because I went to a charter school and there was a solid 40 minutes of sitting and waiting on a second bus at a different school that we were initially bussed to built into the bus commute.
With a 2 year old, sure. But a lot of my PTO used to be "elementary aged child is sick and has to stay home from school, so I have to stay home too because he can't be home by himself for 9 hours". Now I don't have to take PTO for that. Kids are sick and just stay in bed or on the couch, I check on them every so often. Doesn't interfere with work any more than going to get a coffee.
There's nothing wrong with caring for your child. The cause of this situation is insufficient paternal leaves, not having and raising children.
If you as an employer provide a leave of just 15 days for the father (I've seen really big companies do this), and just a few months for the mother, don't be surprised if people lose productivity or just straight up leave when they have children.
Most EU countries have great paternal leave policies. Most other countries could learn something from them.
Somehow, it has become acceptable to forget raising a family for the sake of working, and it's disheartening to see people actually defend companies when they set these policies.
Edit with some more thoughts:
95% of all the time you will spend with your parents is gone. [1]
If your child is raised by a caretaker, you're losing a huge chunk of all the time you'll get with them. On your deathbed, would you feel proud of having delivered another feature instead of spending a bit more time with your family and children?
I guess depends how far you are from the office, and how much time you'll end up burning on commutes. Childcare may be a 5 minute walk from home but a 1+hr unreliable commute from the office.
It depends on the level of needs for the child. There's a certain age range where a child can basically take care of themself for a few hours bur can't be trusted to be home alone (or haven't met the legal age).
This is probably between age 6 and 11, so with the average 1.94 children family with ~2 year spacing, there's a need for something like 7 years of after school monitoring...
Hanging all day in meetings also feels like not working full time…I have to admit, there are meetings where I sit with my child’s and build legos. Those are the most productive meetings I have…
When they're between 1.5-5 you don't really have to watch them all the time, but you can't leave them alone. Depending on your job (fine for my partner when she's being a PM, not fine for me when I'm being an SWE) that can be manageable.
And daycare is booooooonkers expensive. I'm sure a lot of people were like "hmm, $3k/mo or constant low-key distraction... how bad can it be"
I couldn’t find any mention of employees doing full-time childcare in the article. But I suspect you don’t really understand the issues.
If you need an extra hour childcare because of your commute you are unlikely to find childcare that covers that one hour only and works around you. You most likely need to find afternoon/early evening cover. Good luck.
Also, you can work from home distraction free whilst ensuring the kids are not killing themselves. But you can’t just leave them at home incase they kill themselves. They call that neglect.
Be glad you don’t have to sort out childcare or deal with people thinking you “weren’t really working”.
> Also, you can work from home distraction free whilst ensuring the kids are not killing themselves. But you can’t just leave them at home incase they kill themselves. They call that neglect.
Are you speculating or telling from personal experience?
If the first the answer even common sense will give you is no.
If the later you contribute to the problem that a vast majority of responsible workers pay the bills for a minority who overstretched the system.
Something like that might include a casual arrangement like a neighbour watching them after school before you get home, a grandparent dropping by, etc.
The problem is a near-immediate reversion to pre-WFH/hybrid times. They now have five days to solve planning that may have taken some people years, and the family as a whole is probably going to suffer, and one parent's career prospects are probably going to be damaged as a result. A lot of people aren't living near grandma and grandpa right now, which is something they might have considered doing if they knew they were going to be tethered to a desk in an office.
I’m don’t quite get what you mean. It wouldn’t be that unexpected in a nice friendly community for a neighbor to help out occasionally, but people don’t just work occasionally, right?
Of course, I was referring to “ an extra hour childcare because of your commute you are unlikely to find childcare that covers that one hour only and works around you. ”
I just meant examples exist. I can’t use these things since I live 3000 miles from parents and my neighbours and friends all work full time anyway.
Incidentally I understand this is a challenge in China where the retirement age was recently raised and grandparents often provide care.
Think elementary age children who go to school. Most parents would not want a first grader to have to be home alone for a couple hours. School age kids don't need 100% interaction while at home - they just need to be safe, and their parents need to be available occasionally. I would imagine returning to the office means finding after-school care in many cases.
This is a good point. When I started working remotely, I was really clear with my spouse that this doesn't mean that I'm suddenly available to supervise the kid, do work around the house, go pick things up at the store, and so on, just because I was physically at home. I'm still working just as if I was in the office, just without having to drive to a separate building.
The job of a worker can often be realistically done in far less than 40 hours a week. If you're salaried, maybe working 9-12 and 2-4:30 is feasible and legal for performance, and 5x/week for 8 hours in the office takes you away from what you were doing in the padding.
Secondly, RTO means a lack of flexibility in work hours even if you did 40/week. People who didn't have to commute, who had time to take their kids to school or pick them up, now don't have that pre- and post-work time to help kids.
I don't see mention of someone working full-time while also doing full-time child care. I see people who have part-time child care who now need full-time, like:
> A sales-team member who's a parent said they started searching for additional childcare arrangements
and
> Under the hybrid model, one worker was able to leave the office at lunchtime to manage pickup times and shared childcare duties with their partner, who worked from home. The worker said managers were flexible about people signing on later from home to complete their hours.
> Their productivity numbers had not fallen, they added.
You're implying that none of them are on part-time daycare because they should easily be able to convert to full-time daycare now. That is false. You cannot simply convert up if the daycare does not have capacity, to say nothing of the associated costs.
This is just downsizing while suppressing negative PR/investor fear. I'd caution anyone who invests or any of these companies that RTO, you should treat this like any other layoff from the perspective of company performance -- because it is.
Bonus points are that the ones affected most are families, so the companies save even more on the benefits they don't have to cover. Basically, this is roundabout maritial/family status employment discrimination.
I know people that moved to other states during the pandemic that were told they could WFH forever. Unless remote work is in the contract, don't believe anything a company tells you.
Commuting sucks, remote has enormous benefits yada yada, however: The problems (childcare, commuting, etc) that the employees present as huge obstacles, were there before covid and people were managing. The c suites will not break a sweat over these.
On the essence of the policy, this is a quiet layoff, same as Amazon's (which further threatens managers with layoffs if they do not enforce the 5day rto for their reports).
This is really going to unsettle the living situations of a bunch of people, but of course they really important to get everybody in the office so Dell can harness that creative energy and make… more mediocre laptops.
I wonder how many new businesses will spring up in secondary markets because too many people took the pandemic as a chance to move somewhere with a better cost of living, and now they're being orphaned by RTO plans.
someone probably realized that people could work half as much as home and still get the same amount done as before. this pissed them off so much, they want everyone sitting in the office all day, doing the same amount
Register your kid as a pet (emotional support animal), and you can bring it anywhere. Kids should be included in office life! If dog parents can bring their child to work, why not human parents?!
Edit: Dell is a pet friendly company, bringing animals to office is employment perk, and should not be a problem! There are no limitations on species, and humans are technically animals!!!
This one I do not understand. How could you do any meaningful work in Home Office without child care? I mean did they help their kids doing their home work while on job? That was ok during the covid craze but otherwise a no go.
I think it is more that you can paper over any gaps with hybrid. Kids below a certain age need 100% available adults (not necessarily doing anything, but they need to be there). Leaving a kid alone for “just 15 minutes” is not going to fly. WFH gives you that availability to make a quick cutover to handle any disruption: kid is sick, full day care option does not start until 10a, sitter is late, etc.
"RTO" honestly is better characterized as "RTO+H" because there is no expectation that people will _stop_ working at home after RTO, just that they will have the same amount of work to do and now fewer waking hours to do it.
I am hoping that this will lead people to, prior to accepting a job (deal with the devil, more often than not), look into the pedigree of the company and evaluate based on how people within are treated if they want to work for such a place. In other words, I doubt that Dell was sunshine and roses until now. Or in other words: when someone you don’t like is screwed over, be prepared for that next someone to be you.
If you need a scapegoat. The correct place for the blame is management.
Nearly everyone on our team does more work from home than they did sitting at the office. There are a couple notable slackers, but they're not parents. I suspect that's because parents have necessarily become adept at making a schedule and sticking to it.
It's not the employees fault if they trusted the company wouldn't screw up home office, all these companies made employees believe they could have better working conditions, until they forced everyone to go back to the office.
I don't blame the employees but the employer for making broken promises and manipulating their employees into thinking the company is better than the competitors.
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