Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”
Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”
Workers stayed remote even when told they could no longer be promoted.
Others said their local offices had closed since the pandemic
This part is wild. So they closed down the office and then punish the employees for not coming into the office. Tell me this is illegal.
Dude... you're getting "or else."
Your move, Bitch!
Oh no I have to go back to work!
Anyways....
Good.
In my case, it was pretty effed up and I know some of yall are going to dislike this comment. When covid hit, I was instructed by the CTO to put a plan together to quickly make every employee remote accessible to the organization. Upon completing this project (took roughly 3 weeks since majority of employees were working off laptops and only needed to increase our VPN license count - gotta love Cisco), people were asked to work fully remote and if they needed to come into work, they just needed to send an email for approval from their manager to come into the office the following day.
When an employee comes into the office, at the entrance they had to either show their vax card or get their temperature checked, if the employee had a vax card, they were allowed to go to their assigned desk to work, if you did not have a vax card and didn't have a high temperature, you were sent to a designated area of the building to work from, you were allowed to go to your desk to get any belongings you'd need then come back to the designated area.
After 3 months of this, the company had a new policy, all employees must be vaxxed in order to enter the building, no exceptions. If the employee worked remote, no problem you weren't required to be vaxxed. The CTO tells me that I need to communicate to the entire IT team that we will now be RTO (returning to office) permanently, this included project managers... IT is a set of departments that majority can easily work remote. A small portion could come into office to do any hands on work but because the hands on work was done within a specific region of the building it would require these employees to be vaxxed and to provide proof of it. So the CTO decided instead of targeting a small handful of IT professionals, he would just get the entire IT team to get vaxxed and come back into office permanently.
I told the CTO that I don't plan to get vaxxed, I'd rather ride it out. And that other team members felt the same. The CTO gave me an ultimatum. I told him I will send out an IT wide email but that's the only command I will obey. Flat out, CTO tells me anyone who doesn't get vaxxed will be terminated. So I and 4 others got terminated two weeks later.
And now, companies around the U.S. are getting sued for their employer-imposed vaccine mandates.
Last laugh, bitch.
Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.
Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.
Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.
Holy corporate oppression, Batman! That's a shitty deal no matter which option you choose.
I'm glad they've got themselves into a sticky situation.
Also, this observation was funny (in a sad way):
One person said they'd spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices.
That’s a horribly deceiving title. They just stayed remote and made themselves ineligible for promotion.
Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell's plan to restore its in-office culture.
This would be a handy way to get rid of half your staff, but the people you chase away are usually the ones you want to keep. As per the Dead-Sea Effect, the ones who will leave are the ones who generally are more able to, who will be your most employable people, and thus your most talented. Usually.
Making work suck, and letting the best half of the staff bail, seems like stupid and a game show.
That's consistent with my office, plus a hiring freeze so nobody new coming in.
Fortunately, for me, my cardiologist told them to pound sand. Working from home now since 2018.
They were probably like, “Finally, I can go to a company that doesn’t force me to use a Dell.”
Good luck getting people to waste a ton of gas and time going into the office every day. Even before the pandemic, everyone was already using teams for meetings virtually. I think we had physical meetings a few times a year at most, and even then, some people were virtual.
Working as planned. Sadly.
I don't know where those people are going with the tech industry being the way it is but still good for them.
There's a pretty good chance that every employee facing this offer is in a position where Dell sees them as replaceable. They want people who follow orders and not much more, so if you want to look at it through that filter Dell got what they wanted.
Unless somebody over there at the top is crazy, Dell would have had individual deals with the true innovators, decision makers, movers and shakers internally who are viewed as top tier and irreplaceable.