After reversing its position on remote work, Dell is reportedly implementing new tracking techniques on May 13 to ensure its workers are following the company’s return-to-office (RTO) policy, The Register reported today, citing anonymous sources.
Dell will track employees’ badge swipes and VPN connections to confirm that workers are in the office for a significant amount of time.
Dell’s methods for tracking hybrid workers will also reportedly include a color-coding system. From “consistent” to “limited” presence, the colors are blue, green, yellow, and red.
The Register reported today that approximately 50 percent of Dell’s US workers are remote, compared to 66 percent of international workers.
An examination of 457 companies on the S&P 500 list released in February concluded that RTO mandates don’t drive company value but instead negatively affect worker morale. Analysis of survey data from more than 18,000 working Americans released in March found that flexible workplace policies, including the ability to work remotely completely or part-time and flexible schedules, can help employees’ mental health.
I really like my job but if they started monitoring my data like that I’d absolutely quit. There’s already a monitoring mechanism, it’s called your boss needing you to complete tasks on time. If you’re doing that, the only thing data monitoring does it falsely call out people who are doing their work.
I will not work for a company that thinks it needs to babysit it’s employees. The idea that you have to constantly micromanage someone is ridiculous, if they’re that shit at their job, you let them go and get someone else for the role.
Yeah, I used to work for a company like that. It sucked.
The only marginally logical excuse i’ve heard for RTO is to justify rented office space.
A large portion of most rich peoples investment portfolios is commercial real estate.
So if remote work takes off then offices devalue and their invest profiles diminish. That’s why all the big business have colluded to force RTO, even if it would ostensibly cost their business more to do so. The execs personal savings are more important.
This, and it’s a way to make sure urban economies with investments stay stimulated… If the companies said “okay, just do your job, IDC” then a lot of people would move to rural areas. Also, corporate office leases are usually long, like 15 years. If the companies stop paying their leases, the entire flimsy financial system would crumble, since modern economics/property prices are more about potential/theoretical value rather than real value. You need a big fancy building in a fancy city to attract top talent, high earners, so it keeps the class system intact as well.
You need a big fancy building in a fancy city to attract top talent,
WFH attracts me, not fancy buildings in cities… YMMV i guess.
You need a big fancy building in a fancy city to attract top talent, high earners, so it keeps the class system intact as well.
I don’t think that this is that true anymore.
That’s how it is in the company I work for. They aren’t strict about it though, we are supposed to be in office 3/5 days but some people barely make 1/5 . As far as I know nobody cares as there is no tracking system yet.
Remote work is not right for ALL companies. Just ones that are completely or predominantly software-based.
Breakfast cereal manufacturing - hey. Someone’s gotta be there to close up all the boxes.
I forget - does Dell make breakfast cereal?
remote work is pretty prevalent in finance/banking - at my job only the customer facing folks (branch offices, investment/mortgage, etc) need to actually be in the office - that’s only 30% of the workforce. another 15% is hybrid now, the rest are 100% remote.
Remote work is not right for ALL companies. Just ones that are completely or predominantly software-based.
I would expand to all the jobs that can be done with a laptop, an internet connection and a phone.
What the Delly-Os
Love it when the logical excuse is the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Though I think there’s some truth - companies still pay employees for their WFH rigs / utilities (or they should be, anyway), so it’s not exactly free for them to have WFH (just a lot cheaper, if there’s a choice).
The logical excuse I buy into is that commercial real estate is valued on it’s income and if business aren’t renewing leases because they don’t need office space, then commercial real estate values tank. That and thinly veiled layoffs.
How much is dell getting for all the hard foot sucking they are doing or is it a we too have a company and we must look out for others kinda thing ?
Idea: script that connects and disconnects from a VPN over and over at set intervals to send “fuck you” in Morse.
Did they think that’d give them good optics or do they just not care?
It’s a way to cut headcount without doing layoffs. It’s usually followed one or two quarters later by an actual layoff.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now The Register reports that Dell will track employees’ badge swipes and VPN connections to confirm that workers are in the office for a significant amount of time.
An unnamed source told the publication: “This is likely in response to the official numbers about how many of our staff members chose to remain remote after the RTO mandate.”
The Register reported that Dell “plans to make weekly site visit data from its badge tracking available to employees through the corporation’s human capital management software and to give them color-coded ratings that summarize their status.”
Here at Dell, we expect, on an ongoing basis, that 60 percent of our workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week."
In a statement to The Register, a representative said that Dell believes “in-person connections paired with a flexible approach are critical to drive innovation and value differentiation.”
News of Dell’s upcoming tracking methods comes amid growing concern about the potentially invasive and aggressive tactics companies have implemented as workers resist RTO policies.
The original article contains 651 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“human capital management”.
Hello comrade
There’s not a single person I work with who lives in my metro area. Going to an office is the dumbest thing I can think of.
Color coding humans… Following in IBM’s footsteps yet again. 1939 was a hell of a year for the database.
Working from home proved that most of the people are capable of “self-managing” and don’t need a corporate drone telling them what to do. I have a feeling that the push to get back to the office is fueled by insecurities of middle management that became redundant.
When I worked in the office I worked in a cubicle all on my own behind a support column and a potted plant that I put there specifically for the purpose of being unviewable by the idiot manager who wandered around and got in everyone’s way.
Also now people don’t randomly come and ask me questions about why the printer isn’t working, or start sentences with “can you just”, and “it will only take a moment”.
I don’t know if I’m more productive at home than when I was in the office, but I’m definitely not less productive. I would probably be more productive but there really isn’t that much to do. My job is to basically sit around and be there, I’m ready to jump into action when everything breaks.
You can tell how important working from the office is by the fact that they can’t tell whether or not people are working from the office.
Maybe people need to start talking about unionizing while in the office.
Nah, just quit en masse, especially the people who have the most experience there. Dell can’t do business if it doesn’t have people…
Not sure why you’re getting down voted. This is exactly what happened at my last company during the RTO push, senior employees, including me, were leaving in droves and it got bad quickly. As a result the company upped their salaries and offered fully remote work instead of just hybrid to keep people around. The only way a company will listen is if you hit them in their wallets.
Probably because I didn’t say “unionize.”
A union isn’t going to fix a broken company culture, it’s just going to get more bargaining power for employees. The union won’t change priorities for the executive team to prioritize cyber security, customer-friendly products, and it probably won’t change company policy around badging. It might get more WFH, but if the executive team is hell-bent on tracking its users, the union will probably shift focus to better benefits (oh, you want to screw us over more? Pay more!).
So no, I don’t think it’s worth trying to unionize and fix the company from within. Quit and take all of that institutional knowledge with you to hit them where it counts: the stock price.
Just to be clear, this is the same Dell who fucked up and leaked a bunch of personal info.
… the number-one cause of which is usually missed patching, which is caused by people just.not.caring.
I can see this going very well for them.
based on the dell products i’ve used, i’m not working there. i get the motive, but they need some good ass cybersecurity to have information like that be kept safe
The same Dell that just leaked my information yesterday because of their incompetence, that Dell?
I wonder if there’s some kind of correlation between this perspective management has and their products not working well. My understanding is that employees who feel empowered and respected do better work, and surely tracking them all day is helping…
If only they had been so rigorous in protecting customer data.
Or making quality consumer products.
