Tell that to these guys. It’s not the remote workers demanding everyone work remotely.
In office work is prone to the same difficulty in different forms. You don’t think people were alt-tabbing in the office? Taking really long lunches or coffee breaks? Tying one or more drinks on during those breaks? Clocking out mentally if not physically by 2 on Fridays?
We had a young woman working multiple jobs and feeding the work back to Pakistan. We had a young man who smoked weed and played WoW all day.
Turns out you can just fire people!
So what you're saying is, the work was getting done?
https://vimeo.com/866052086/7d7781e9ea
The tag line at the end could be interpreted different ways and is slightly awkward, but not enough that I'd give it a second thought.
IMHO this article is just people yet again trying flex the power of shame and contempt, against something they dislike (returning to in-person work). Before you join in, just watch the video!
Exactly. Who amongst us can say that they’ve never quoted Iko Iko lyrics in a threat to employees? It is a common and normal thing that happens all the time
Edit: I mean not that it's a message for the competition to hear, but it's the leaders telling telling the team 'we're tough - when we're together!'.
I would agree with your final statement and would go further: Share with any people considering work at WebMD: Better to cringe now instead of after you accept an offer.
If an adult spoke to me like that in the context of any type of relationship, I would immediately look for a way out. Maybe that’s the point here. Yes, there’s a hierarchy at work, and those at the top have the right to make the rules. But the smug condescension in this video says “I haven’t made the business case for this or I haven’t effectively communicated it, so I’m just resorting to ‘because I said so’”. Not the kind of environment I’d want to be part of.
I watched the video. It was even worse than I expected.
Here is another fitting quote
>I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.
I shouldn't be amazed, but somehow I still always am.
Because if most of them just ignore you, what then? Fire most of your staff?
1. Track badging 2. Enforce RTO via chain-of-command. SVPs, VPs, and directors have aggregate RTO compliance metrics. SVPs crack the whip on VPs to get their numbers up, VPs crack the whip on their directors, and directors crack the whip on their reports, and so on, all the way down.
The actual implementation of the policy was a mess and there was poor messaging especially at the beginning. I'm pretty sure it still doesn't take PTO or illnesses into account — if there's an issue with that, you're supposed to work it out with your manager — and from what I heard they simply handled the holidays by excluding the work weeks before and after Christmas from the metrics. But, ultimately, the chain of command approach appears to have worked very well in terms of actually getting people to come in.
edit: Just noticed from your profile that you also work at Amazon, so I guess there's nothing new in my comment for you :)
Also: Good luck filling those positions (especially after that video)
Probably the 3 entry-level employees that still care to go to the office.
Yeah, if they won't eat their own dog food then why would I want to eat it?
But don't take my word for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebMD#Criticism
There are some leaders who simply can't function in a remote environment. However, this is a flaw of their leadership and the organizational culture, not a problem with employees or their preferences. It is a problem with personal fear, inflexibility, and lack of vision more than anything else. My experience is that the older people are and the longer they have worked at a company, the more issues they have with remote work.
We proved during COVID that we can function just fine remotely. It benefits the employees in a hundred different ways. An organization that wants people to come to work at their detriment is one that doesn't value their people, and this is how they are expressing it.
Yes this is the entire point. They want to turn up both voluntary attrition or be able to fire for cause. Either way they get to lighten their employee costs which is the goal.
The economics of it make sense on both sides (Office costs, salary costs, commutes, hiring pool access)
And the organization impacts work well (for knowledge based businesses) if Leadership is able to adapt to measuring outputs instead of inputs and fostering clarity of goals.
Personally I don't understand why there is even a push to return people to office if they are working fine remotely. We're having this argument at my place right now... Most of us have been remote for 3 years and there's no obvious signs that we're delivering lower quality or any slower than we were before. I think everyone is onboard with occasional team meetups, but requiring an arbitrary amount of office per week serves no good purpose.
I do get the need for office work in some cases, but outside of that it seems to me a lot of this is simply driven by managers feeling less important when they can't be office busy bodies. At very least it's interesting to note that the desire to return to work appears to be highest among those with more "power".
The economics of it make sense on both sides
Smart companies don't care about either but many (usually larger) corps have vested interest in both.
I finish work in 1-2 hrs. With RTO, I finish work within 4-5 hrs. Combine this with a physical commute.
Constant breaks in attention. People just asking stupid shit irl when it’s clearly documented online. The cOlLaBorRaTiOn is really just micromanaging issues projected onto us.
Oh and let’s not forget the exposure to your virus of the week/month from people with kids in school or daycare!
Just another deadass company and one that I will never directly work for
I think it's awesome some people have found such a place, more power to them/you, but having so little to do is a very alien concept to me.
translation: "we want you to work harder and spend 2 hours a day commuting to an uncomfortable office to make us more money"
I would quit over just the existence of this video if it had been authored by the company I work at.
The great thing about free markets however is that companies that offer remote working have a great competitive advantage by virtue of that alone.
However, there haven't been any long term studies on "innovation", if you can even define that, and how it fares with remote work. There is also no long term data on how new people to the industry will do starting their career remotely. I know personally I would not be where I am if I weren't in the office near senior people at the start of my career. But I also know that there are ways to replicate that ad-hoc learning with remote work.
I'm not sure they mean to start a RTO Krewe, but it sure feels like they're calling out the WFH Krewe.
Related: has any contested RTO on a disability basis?
Oh and additionally, they've been running at less than a skeleton crew for the last couple years. Choosing to hire overseas contractors that can't due the full job due to HIPPA requirements. They are trying to get people to quit so they don't have to pay severance.
Lots of bean counters and HR types, though.
My second thought was their CEO looks like someone named Chester who isn't legally allowed near children.
My third thought was they made the finals of weird videos to be mocked on Last Week Tonight when it comes back in February.
Conclusion: They jumped their own shark in a way Elon would find difficult to attain so I don't think anyone good would want to RTO to work for them anyhow.
*CEO stops talking... extremely cringe workers dancing with a greenscreen backdrop... google meet "no one else is here; because we are all in person now!" and... their interpretation of the lyrics to the background song*.
Wow. What a close, awful.
Truly awful.
--
However to defend them a little, I personally have noticed that the people who routinely come to the office tend to be better informed and have more realistic expectations of what is possible.
It's true that being in-person can paper over communication gaps, and you can argue that those gaps shouldn't exist; but they do. Additionally, while I am CTO of a remote-first company there starts becoming a knowledge and culture imbalance with the people who are capable of going to the office from time-to-time.
It's also true that we need a lot of positive interactions as humans, and we tend to have micro-positive interactions more often in person, usually when we reach out to someone over text chat or have a meeting it's somewhat negative. My psychologist once told me it takes 9 good interactions to offset 1 bad one, which is probably not grounded in science but I think the proportions are something like that; and it seems like we are more prone to communicate more often negatively if there is any friction in making that communication.
I would like us to have some form of strongly flexible work, but I am not certain that this is possible... it's essentially "worst of both worlds" where we have an expensive office that is barely used and people can't live where they really want to.
I guess co-working is the way to solve the former, but it doesn't help with the latter. Though co-working spaces can be as expensive for 1 week as taking a whole month anyway. :(
Sarcasm aside, capitalism at work, really nothing to see here. They'll lose employees from the demand to work in office for the various reasons, and maybe it'll affect their bottom line, and maybe they'll learn some lessons. Or maybe they whither by not moving with the times. The websites they create are nothing that couldn't be lost.