Big blues: IBM's remote-worker crackdown is company-wide, including its engineers

Backflip

I left IBM just over 5 years ago after a 14 year career.

When I worked there IBM actively promoted remote working as a way of saving money on real estate costs and boasted about the high ratio of workers to office space. They introduced a whole lot of policies that enabled remote working and discouraged office based working with hot-desking policies that removed sense of community and collaboration that used to be generated by ad hoc encounters and meetings.

A lot us moved out of the office due to these policies - IBM then stood for "I'm By Myself". While it is true that a lot of dedicated folks contributed a lot while working remotely - a friend who was a single mother comes to mind - there were a lot of people who took advantage of the lax oversight from managers who were located thousands of miles away.

Taking the piss....

While working at NetApp we had a Channel Manager who "worked from home" during each school holiday.

You could not get her on the phone for an entire week.

Turns out she was babysitting her own children, plus half of the Office and the children of her friend who worked at NetApp competitor Nimble.

It's that kind of behaviour that prompts employers to reign in staff that take the piss.

In this particular case though - it was a win-win-win situation. At least she couldn't do any more damage in front of partners during that time.

What ever happened to technology

In a world of ever shrinking salaries, flexible working was a meaningful perk to many.

I worked at IBM near the millennium, it was a fun flexible vibrant place to work then.

And Govt / Tech execs claim they don't know why more folk don't want to work in IT.

....WTF ???

So IBM has come to the same conclusion that I did about ten years ago.

That being that working "in the cloud", also known as "centralized computing", also known as "telecommuting" (as in teletype), is, like, totally 1950s technology.

So we can finally get off the cloud bandwagon, right? It's obviously a failed technology if even IBM can't make it work internally!

telecommuting marketing staff

Telecommuting in the longer term is not productive - I reckon working about 50% of capacity.

Managers of people cannot telecommute, and staff that fall in to the 'require management' category cannot either.

Marketing needs managed...so no.... i am surprised they let them do it in the first place.

Titanic deckchair painting strikes again!

As it worked so well at Yahoo and HPE!

Heaven forbid that they actually focus on something that might help their companies....

Plus good luck finding that extra 40% office space that you now need, especially in such expensive markets as San Francisco.

Sure, get rif of the older, more expensive workers

And all you'll end up doing is get rid of the ones who have a clue on how things work, and how to fix the weird problems that crop up.

Although I'm sure they'll be more than happy to tele-commute on an adhoc contract at rates that will equate to 1 hours work equals one weeks pay for anyone else.

I fondly remember the days when IBM thought working at home was a great idea, both for employees, managers and even a VP in the Software division. I knew they had no clue about teamwork then, and today, they demonstrate no more understanding of teamwork.

Ave! True to Ginni!

I've been at IBM for a while now, and this has been fairly obvious for some time now; Boulder is massive, but pretty much a ghost town. Ricoh leases a few buildings, and there is a ton of datacenter space, but there are entire floors that are either abandoned, or very sparsely populated. If we all get axed / shuffled to Atlanta this summer, I would not be surprised.

Mandatory telework is pretty soul-crushing the way they run it, but, this is IBM. There are a lot of soul-crushing things happening here. Par for the course. Maybe this place was a fun and vibrant place to be in the past, but we are all kind of waiting for the headsman to come for a visit now. Not very encouraging.

The fault, dear Ginni, is not in your stars, but in your self.

I looked at that picture and thought that I were to work there in that environment that I would be constantly irritated by the chap in the hat.

Then I thought again that he's perhaps constantly irritated by the fluorescent lighting which seems so prevalent in OfficeDom.

Poor sods, all of them.

Pissstakers galore, crap management

A couple of rotten apples will always spoil it for the rest. A handful taking the piss and not being caught means that management sucks and the company is totally ignorant as to what is going on. Remote working or flexi working is a must for those who are parents with young children or for whatever reason are unable to live near enough to the office.

Companies that don't want to compromise or go back on what they originally said are simply admitting that they f***ed up and their managers are incompetent.

Oh and by the way, Ericsson is no better in terms of presence vs absence. But it's not the remote workers taking the piss, it's the ones that work on site: arrive at 10, 2 hour lunch break, go to gym next door, cigarette breaks, leave at 7pm. How many hours do management really think they put in? Come on. And the one that arrives early to leave early and actually WORKS?! That person is frowned upon for "leaving early".

The problem with this kind of move?

Those that can walk, walk. The people who are most able to walk, most quickly, are usually the people you can least live without.

"The consolidation effort, which IBM is pitching as a move to improve productivity, teamwork, and morale, is set to be extended to all IBM operations over the next six months."

1 out of 3 is not bad........as a team they will all hate management I guess. Losing hours in travel works wonders for productivity and we all know that people who are forced to do things they dont like/agree with are going to be way more positive about the company........

Obviously downsizing - everything else is flannel.

Whatever they say, the real reason is to reduce their number of staff. Everything else is flannel. 'Move or leave' is the real message, and the subsequent reduction in staff won't cost them a cent... except in good staff, reputation and employee satisfaction. The people they retain will be the dregs who can't get jobs elsewhere, and also will be disgruntled about being forced to move or have long commutes. Let's hope IBM have some good people outsourced already, otherwise IBM will stand for 'I've Been Mugged' if you happen to be a customer.

How are the mighty fallen

Once there was a company that was in the forefront of the computing industry. Now there is a company that is fading into the shadows and will soon be gone. It will struggle for a while but this is the beginning of the end.

Brexit ?

Since IBM Portsmouth will relocate to Ireland in the coming years (2), this means that they will have gotten rid of all remoties by then, excellent planning!

I feel sorry for the poor sods, I work in a home office ... I work longer hours, sure, but I have no traffic and no colleagues lol'ing at the coffee machine or bothering me about GNU knows what ...

Old news to some...

I was a "home" worker for IBM in Canada back in the noughties, just before I left in 2010 they had a "back to the office" push - which was mandatory - show up or lose your job.

I'd have to quit.

This would break me. I commute 50 miles a day twice a week to my IBM office as it is, I couldn't do that five days a week. Physically it'd destroy me, financially it would break me. It would triple my fuel costs, push my childcare costs up past the point of affordability and for what? Improving morale? Don't make me laugh.

...Fucking hell.

Posting anon as current IBM employee.

Why does this sound familiar ?

A Dilbert from 1996 !

And a Dilbert from 2013 !

Teleworking in the office

I have spent a large proportion of my career working in scattered teams, and teleworking made almost no difference.

It's all very well talking about teamwork and the ability to interact in an office, but some teams are necessarily scattered - at one point a team I was a member of had members in all continents except Africa and Antarctica. Organising a team audioconference when people were located on the West coast of the USA, the East coast of the USA, the UK, continental Europe, the Middle East, India, Asia, Australia and Japan was a challenge in itself. I think we did it once. Even when confined to the UK, I worked in a team that had members in 5 offices, so all team meetings were audioconferences (we never got videoconferencing to work seamlessly).

Even if, when teleworking, I went into an office, there was no guarantee that all the people I needed to talk to were in the same office, the same campus, or even the same town. If you need to ring someone up, or send an email to interact with someone, what does it matter it you do it from an office or from home?

On the other hand, if you depend upon work for social interaction, then teleworking can get quite lonely. Also, if you are in a team where all the other members are confined in one office, and you are the teleworker, it can be tough to stay up to speed with things. You also need to work very hard on keeping good relationships going with people you need: it is very, very easy for them to ignore phone calls, instant messages, and emails from you. Despite these challenges, teleworking can be made to work if you (and others) are professional about it.

Some managers are happy with teleworking, and work to mitigate the disadvantages. For others, it is outside their comfort zone, and they don't feel in control unless they can see their team when they wish. Then again, a manager who thinks that a manager's job is team control is not ideal in my book: I've always thought that a manager's job is to remove the hurdles that are preventing a team from doing their jobs - I've probably been lucky enough to work (mostly) with teams of experienced individuals who could be trusted to get on with things.

It's probably another of these swinging pendulum policies: being in favour of teleworking, or not - just like the cyclical swings from centralisation to decentralisation and back again, segmenting an organisation to deal with markets with vertical 'silos' of resource or having horizontal resourcing structures; and other management fads. Unfortunately, such swinging pendulums ruin people's lives.

IBM - great work environment

Who would not love to come into the office when your spot is on the beanbag chair and working wireless with a laptop? I know my back would love 8 hrs of that.

impactful?

My mouth was impactful, but then I had the wisdom teeth pulled. Could we set up reeducation camps for corporate PR types who believe that "impactful" is a word?

Remember when IBM were relevant

erm..... No

remote software engineers have also been cut in Canada

I know a number of former remote software engineering employees from the Toronto Lab that have now left to work at other companies after receiving the move or quit ultimatum. This is sold as a teamwork building move, but is coupled with round after round of traditional batch firings ("Resource actions" in IBM HR lingo), so everybody knows that this is really a thinly disguised covert offshoring mechanism. How much team building is possible when the moral of those that survive the ax is crushed through observation of how little the company values the most experienced engineers that are the first to be tossed.

Two statements: Working in an office promotes the 9-5 attitude, whereas, working at home the company gets not an 8 hour day, but more like a 10-12 hour day. I was an engineer that worked for a company that allowed the workers to show up at whatever time and go home whenever. They decided that they wanted ALL workers to adhere to the scheduled workday by showing up at 0800. Boy , it didn't take the company one week to find out that was a mistake. We showed up at 0800 and left at 1630 regardless of the status of the work. In the one week trial, rules went back to show up whenever but just get the job done. IBM maybe will recognize the error of their ways and go back to a work force that doesn't watch the clock, has good morale and all th othr things that management espouses as the reason for the move. GOOD LUCK IBM'S.

" By requiring that workers move to hub cities such as San Francisco, Austin, or New York, IBM could both rid itself of older workers and make the jobs more appealing to younger, lower-salaried professionals. "

The thought of micro-management in a cube farm is 1980's technology

I guess no one here is old enough to remember when IBM stood for "I've Been Moved." Telecommuters who are forced back into the office are not going to have to move, those in now closed regional offices will. Back in the '60s IBM could assume that spouses didn't work and were flexible - not today.

My how things change...

I was a contractor working remotely (from the Chicago area) with IBM for several years and they were all in on people working remotely at the time. Towards the end of my stint with them (closing out that contract in late '12), they were opening data centers in rural areas -- some would say "depressed" areas -- where there was cheaper labor. I interviewed with a manager at one of those new data centers (in Dubuque, IA) and, while they would have preferred local people, they were at least open to remote work. I later heard from several recruiters that that facility was looking for administrators, technicians, etc. but only locals need apply -- or you'd have to move to IA. With this new mandate for the new shoulder-to-shoulder workplace, I have to wonder how they plan on dealing with those new data centers they built in places like IA. Chicago's not even on the list of acceptable work locations any more and Dubuque surely isn't. Looking for office space in Chicago and its suburbs? Apparently a lot of space will soon be available.

That video is absolutely precious. It's a video made by marketers, aimed at marketers.

Does that even work? Didn't the intended audience see right through it? Maybe even mentally notate half-a-dozen improvements that could have been made?

Hi, I . . . uh . . . I work from home

This showed up in my Flipboard feed last week

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-work-from-home

911 OPERATOR: 911—what’s your emergency?

ROBERT: Hi, I . . . uh . . . I work from home.

OPERATOR: O.K., is anyone else there with you, sir?

ROBERT: No, I’m alone.

OPERATOR: And when’s the last time you saw someone else? Was that today?

ROBERT: Uh, my wife . . . this morning, I guess.

...

Working shoulder to shoulder

Because there's no more office space to accommodate everyone. Perhaps they could introduce bunk desks?

HP started the same policy

last year .. went unreported .

IBM office consolidation

Yikes, IBM sold their d/t building to condo types. I expect we will be seeing IBMers out on the street panhandlingm for office space.

IBM, a technology leader?

The technology has been making it more and more easy to support a remote workforce and IBM pulls this stunt? Glad I don't work for 'em. I've heard that this is a company on the wane for some time because of recent stupidity and I guess this is the latest move toward a company drifting into irrelevancy.

How does this effect IBM's sales teams? I used to work at IBM in sales. For the large part, in outside sales, people almost never went into the office. My last manager happened to live in the same city that I was in and we met in the office two-three times in the two years I worked for him. I don't even know it it would be possible for all the sales reps, sales engineers, etc to be in the small local office where I live. They wouldn't have the desks.

There are a lot people in sales, technically, who do not really sell (I was not sure what they did on a day to day). For instance, X industry leader. I wonder if they will be forced to move to another city.

They must aspire to be the foremost disruptive technology company.

Flexibility is the key, at both ends of the deal.

There are some very good points made here about the merits and disadvantages of home-working. I agree with those who say that a mix is good, and what that mix looks like depends on your role/project etc.

I have no doubt that IBM are doing this hamfistedly, and that it will have all sorts of unintended consequences, the vast majority of which will be negative for staff and negative for the organisation, but..

I work for a company that is very similar to IBM in a lot of ways. As such, I suspect they suffer from many of the problems I experience with remote workers. While some people do take a flexible and responsible attitude to remote working, far far more of them do not. The proportion who won't travel - point blank refuse - even by exception is breathtaking, and while "remote working" they take hours out of the day to do sh1t that has nothing to do with work - and you never get the time back from them. And unless you take the time to keep a journal of their pi$$-taking and episodes of intransigence, there's nothing you can do.

Meanwhile those of us who have to look the customer in the eye are spending 4 nights a week in a fscking hotel, and taking flights on Monday and Friday.

These people have no regard for the value in getting the design team together face to face for a project kick off or a monthly review. Never met the team member is who is dealing with the network design that they're so heavily dependent on, or the security and monitoring systems they must integrate with. You end up with 10 designs each containing unresolved assumptions and dependencies that relate to the other 9 designs because the idiots haven't talked to each other.

And then there are the conference calls. Have you ever had one of those, which is for a structured discussion, where 45 minutes in the hour is dead air? "Bob, you're on mute. Bob? BOB? Is anyone in the same office as Bob?" "Sorry about that, I was talking away on mu... oh hold on, a man's at the front door to deliver a washing machine. I'll just let him in and show him where I need it plumbing in, and make him a cup of tea"

If those are the problems IBM experience with remote workers, I don't blame them for their new initiative. I'd like to see my lot follow suit.

Related: In common with IBM, we are awash with coffin-dodgers. And I don't mean those wise old owls who know where the bodies are buried, and can knock up a Cobol patch in their sleep. I mean people - probably in the business prevention department - who have been in place for the last 20+ years, surviving cull after cull, and re-org after re-org without ever adding a single bit of value to the place. Big old companies have lots of places to hide, and that is the only trick in these geezers' toolbags.

So if IBM are doing this as a way of culling thousands of people who remember when all this was valves (but never knew what a valve was and never cared to ask) then I hope my company does the same thing. The diamonds in the rough can always be spared by exception.

As for making allowances for people with kids... well sorry but, usually, its those of us without that get the sh1tty end of the stick, sooo.... change is as good as a rest, eh?

No size fits all

My biggest worry about work from home - with colleagues in several timezones: when does the day begin, when does it end.

My saving grace (I travel, i.e., visit customers 100's to 1000's of km away from home) two to three weeks per month - is that I do not participate in BYOD and I do not have a smartphone. So, no email 24x7.

If home is the only office - their are risks about maintaining the co-worker feeling.

So, I cannot walk over to someones desk - but I can always call or skype to be more personal.

Personally, I fear any company that tries to say "one style fits all" will lose in the long run. Manufacturing may be an exception - but certainly "services" do not not need to be location bound.

And, yes - I would like to meet up with my colleagues more often. If we all worked out of the same office - that would mean we all had no work to do (our work is providing a service at the customer). Maybe we would meet Monday at the airport lounge :) -- that has actually happened a few times ;)

Is this IBM's BlackBerry moment?

About 10 years ago I briefed Gartner on IBM's behalf on IBM's emerging social collaboration tools - at the time, they had largely been developed by employees on their own time as tools to collaborate with their own colleagues - shared bookmarks, corporate micro-blogging, employee homepages etc.

I remember Gartner telling me that we had a huge edge over Microsoft; not just because of our technology, but because of our culture - Gartner said we were 400,000 people who lived and breathed remote, mobile collaborating and contrasted us to Microsoft's campus-based organisation.

The world remains mobile, social and flexible. Yes, we are flocking to cities; but we are also working from the coffee shop and the beach, and valuing the flexibility to find a work/life/home balance when we can.

I knew that BlackBerry had lost if forever when they announced they were abandoning the consumer market in order to concentrate on what they knew best - the enterprise customer. That's possibly the daftest misunderstanding of the role of the SmartPhone in our lives it was possible to make at the time.

Two of IBM's great strengths were its flexible, boundaryless collaborative culture; and the freedom it gave us to find the most productive work in pattern for ourselves. Just as the rest of the world is embracing those ideas, it's madness for Big Blue to turn its back on them.

Doesn't Add Up

I live in Austin and know a lot of IBMer's. Also have family that worked there for many years. All of those cities, except maybe Raleigh, are very expensive and lower paid workers won't be able to afford to live in them. People with two healthy incomes can't afford it. In addition, Austin is encouraging companies to be more flexible, commit to flexible hours, allow telecommuting to help the traffic, and on and on. The idea that there are that many in the younger workers that would not consider telecommuting is odd too. I don't believe it's true across the board because so many are adamant about work-life balance, equal parenting, and other quality of life issues. It will definitely cut the workforce. The rest of it sounds like a smoke screen.

Unnecessary Stress

Thirty days to decide to either stay or leave is not very much time. There is so much to consider - rentals or home pricing in a new city, sale of existing home, cost of breaking a lease if one rents, schools for kids, financial situation, leaving friends, situation with elderly relatives, and the impact on life style. If you decide to leave, a new job might not be at hand within 30 days. Bills have to be paid.

Counting on a large numbers of older employees to quit is a bit of a misnomer. There are a huge number of people who have no savings and lots of debt. They are living on credit even though they have a well paying job, a house, car, boat, and other toys. These 50+ individuals know that getting a job equivalent or better to what they currently have is almost impossible even if they are highly qualified.

A workplace with a lot of pent up stress. Now that is a team with a common purpose.

Coffee coffee ... no coffee

Everyone will be coming into the office for the coffee... oh wait :-)

IBM forcing staff to resign

While I don't know if it applies in the USA they can expects lots of Constructive Dismissal suits in Europe.

I ran a Citrix farm.

20 servers for 100 onsite staff. Always VERY busy.

2 servers for 80 offsite staff. Usually working-from-home managers. Barely awake. Clock in early, fire off a bunch of urgent emails, then stay disconnected till 10.30 PM when they fire off some more urgent emails cc:ing eveyone in the address list. Working from home is largely a pisstake that nobody talks about. Managers know this because they do it themselves.

It worked so well for Yahoo

Emulating Marissa Mayer doesn't seem to be much of a recipe for success -- if it's the company's success that matters. I understand that Marissa personally did quite well, as I'm sure we all knew she would.

The only way this makes sense for the company is if IBM's board and management have decided to pursue a harvesting strategy -- cut costs, reduce investments, maintain high prices for existing customers, and milk the company dry. The most highly-skilled and marketable employees -- probably also the most expensive -- will leave rather than accept the new conditions. But losing your best people is fine as long as you no longer care about long-term customer satisfaction, particularly if your customers are entangled in your products and the cost of leaving you for a competitor (both in actual costs and process) are so high that they have to continue paying license fees for years as they dig themselves out of your products and into replacement products.

Management and shareholders may end up doing very well with this strategy, but it's not so great for customers and employees.

Smells like Rank and Yank to me

Having lived through the notorious Rank and Yank at HP (and IBM, Microsoft, Computer Associates, GE, et) . This is yet another way to not "motiivate" employees and is really just a way to cull the HURDS without paying severence.

So Yahoo did this and now IBM is doing it. Two female CEOs.... Coincidence?