Thread regarding 3M layoffs

A3M will go down as the worst legacy of Roman empire. This will be use repeatedly as future MBA case study.

They can't take WYW away as long as A3M is in place. Although I am not fond of A3M, we need to live with it for now. We have many team that are completely international. There are no local managers anymore. So what is the point coming to the office when your team is located elsewhere? The people who claim here that no one understands their non-remote work seem also not to understand the remote work situation.
I personally was very fed up with remote work after the pandemic. It was rather unsettling for me not to see any real person for a full day. Still I am happy about the flexibility and I often work half day home, half day at the office. It is a great balance for me. If I want to get something done without interruptions, I can't go to the office. Without seeing any people, I lose my motivation. Talking to colleagues (even if they are not on the same projects) brings new ideas. Everyone has different working situations. That is why I like WYW.
For the people complaining here: WYW doesn't take anything away from you. Don't begrudge it to the people. Instead of being against each other, we could support us. Pay increase for non-flexible jobs. Use your energy to fight for this instead of taking away benefits from your coworkers.
Btw I already went before wyw to weddings at the weekend. And I never claim to work on weekends. If you don't have a good work-life balance, it is not the fault of WYW or of people with remote jobs. Change something about your situation (and I do feel sorry for you if it's not possible), but don't blame it on people with other working conditions.

I know of area teams who are enjoying the full flexibility from the comfort of their homes. They can even cook healthy meals at home and take afternoon naps. Best part of all they can avoid all the travel times.

WYW is really great for the area teams. And they get paid much better than Plant teams!

WYW is a great iniative but only for office staff, but why does mm.m not give a hoot about the pay increases of production worker who are grafting all shifts, seems like the bottom feeders are just that, no chance to progress and still doing nightshifts which are not great for mental health or physical health, sad to say the death of a production operator was on nightshift at 4am , tiredness makes the mind forget things and focus is poor. Shorten 12 hour nightshifts to 8 hours, Hope Wee Pete is reading this as he says he cares so so much about each and every one of us and this is his priority,, full of $hite wee man

Work Your Way flexibility is ESSENTIAL to 3M's health and survival for many reasons.

3M committed to this program in a big way, assuring employees of their commitment to the program and employee well-being. Trusting 3M, 100s, if not 1000s of employees made significant decisions relying on this 3M HR policy. Employees movds to other states, investing in home office space, spouses quitting jobs, etc..

To suddenly expire and re-neg on their program and require employees to return to the physical office (which is now a conglomerate of cubes for all but the elite) is irresponsible, and perhaps illegal. What's next, 3M will expire their maternity leave policy while the employee is giving birth?

Even if you come in to 3M (and pay for gas, parking, food, etc) you still have to go sit in a box and join a Teams screen meeting for personnel that are remote- ie. all the people they offshored to Costa Rica, sales reps, etc)

Work Your Way is a great way to employ the best talent available; not just the best talent near Maplewood.

Finally, most people do say they are more productive working remote.

Wow, reading the garbage in the responses is comical. Sounds like best way to have layoffs would have been to eliminate WYW. No severance, almost no restructuring costs. The collaboration would return and like minded hard working employees could run this place like the days of old (save the boomer responses I am an X-er). Yes there are fantastic people that do excellent work from home, however the majority are playing the victim card and are easily replaced. Bring on the thumbs down lets set a record!

The ignorance and arrogance of some of these posts attempting to compare 3M to a financial services firm. It has and always will be a manufacturing company and therefore will always require, rely on close, in person collaboration especially but not limited to the lab and pilot plants. My fear is it’s almost too late and 3M has already lost its innovative edge as a result of WFH due to Covid and now the downright entitlement culture it has fostered for it to continue. It started at the top I must say- remember seeing MR and executives calling in from their home (gym) offices more than a year after Covid, never even getting out to see the plants until long after. Imagine if MR and MV had the forethought (intelligence) and hopped in their cars and traveled to the N95 production plant to set up their temporary offices there to show support of the teams that were working tirelessly during those early days and maybe even held a press conference or two? Huge missed employee morale boosting opportunity not to mention brand building. Imagine the positive press! Can’t teach common sense let alone leadership though.

Perhaps the most important reason why face to face communication within the workplace is essential is the misinterpretation of written contact. We have all experienced the text message that came out wrong or the email that was too direct and hurt someone's feelings. When we are looking at our colleagues face as we speak to them we can judge the non-verbal clues such as their facial expressions and use these to decide on our approach.

The downfall of 3M started when the stopped subsidizing the cafeterias and people stopped going to the cafeterias and interacting with others. Look it up , the cafeteria subsidies stopped and the number of ROIs went down as did the number of patent filings. As a lab rat I count on talking and interacting with people to share ideas and to brainstorm. That was hat 3M was founded on and survived on for many decades. Now I see people never show up as active on teams and I ask a question of the in an email and I don’t hear back for days to over a week. That screams to me they are not working.

Doesn't matter what it is called. WYW, flexibility, work from home, it is how the world will move towards. It however can be a win-win. Leave WYW as the norm, and downsize current office space etc to save costs. For those who think WYW should canned, you have to remember that Pandora's box has been opened and there is no going back. Blame the pandemic, no point blaming the younger generation. The proof was that for some roles, working from home was proven to be possible.

My personal opinion is that we should reward those who can't WYW, those who are on production line, have to be on site or have to be present in person. Make it such that they know that the company values those who don't have the flexibility and don't have the desire to take advantage of WYW.

I don't think the senior leadership will scrap the WYW program. Reason is they are enjoying it themselves too. They can work from the comfort of their homes.

Life is unfair. Wake up!!

It delights me to see you fighting amongst yourselves.

“Get back to the office!” I hear it very often from the people and leaders who are so afraid of loosing their job, because they know they will be useless elsewhere. They are working 24/7 365 thinking they are irreplaceable. No friends, hobbies, no other life, but work. So dear “backtoofficers” please keep this lifestyle for yourself, and do not try to impact lifes of people, who are having a quality life also outside of the work. It is your choice to live like this, but others have more to do in life than just being a number in corporate. We love to work, yet we also love our friends, families, hobbies and living a life.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/03/a-message-for-male-ceos-on-return-to-office-from-top-wall-street-woman.html

Which side prevails in this RTO tug-of-war remains to be seen. Yet, the bigger question, according to some leaders, is why there’s still a struggle at all.

Count Sallie Krawcheck in this latter group. The Ellevest co-founder and CEO and former Citi CFO and head of global wealth management at Bank of America believes flexibility is the new currency. Companies that look to recreate a pre-pandemic way of working are going to be left behind when it comes to keeping and attracting the best talent.

Speaking to a group of CFOs last month at a private event in New York City hosted by the CNBC CFO Council, Krawcheck said she heard loud and clear that corporate culture and cohesiveness depends on people being in the office. She summed up what she heard from peers in a subsequent interview with CNBC: “In other words, they were saying we have to get back to the way it was.”

The problem with that thinking, Krawcheck said, is that the work environment that existed pre-pandemic “worked for white men, not everyone, and certainly not women and under-represented groups.”

At the CFO meeting, she told a majority male group of finance leaders to look around the room. “Who’s missing from here?” she asked them. “If we want to go back to the way it was, then acknowledge that you know it works mainly if you’re a man and have a wife at home.”

The most progressive leaders are not looking to return to pre-pandemic ways, Krawcheck said, but instead are striving to offer arrangements that work for all employees. She pushes back against the idea that culture can exist only when people are in the office, or that to get ahead, full-time in-office attendance is required.

“Leaders make these statements as if they’re true,” she said. “That’s like saying you can only have a conversation if you’re face to face with someone. And believe me, if being in the office was going to work to get more women and people of color promoted, it would have happened already. It’s not like we didn’t try hard enough.”

At women-centric financial platform Ellevest, Krawcheck said employees are fully remote and that in-person events take place when she and her team feel they’ll be more effective. “Our culture revolves around our really strong shared mission of getting more money into the hands of women,” she said. “There’s no confusion about our mission and culture and it has nothing to do with people being in the office or not.”

Krawcheck said her team is “perfectly capable of training people over Zoom and what we hear is that not having to commute into an office every day is tremendously stress-relieving.”

Of course, she acknowledges that fully remote is not right, or even possible, for every company, but flexibility and autonomy are well within reach. As for leaders who tell her that they’re still trying to figure out a hybrid/remote/in-office arrangement, she’s sanguine.

“At least that represents intellectual curiosity,” she said. “They’re testing things to see what works. I much prefer that than a blanket demand that everyone get back to the office and that’s how we’re going to grade loyalty and commitment.”

She cautions leaders that are betting too heavily on layoff worries as a means of forcing people back into the office. “Good luck with that. There’s one thing I know: you do not bet against the U.S. economy,” she said.

Krawcheck has been through enough business cycles to understand that the economy will grow again and businesses will be started. “If you’ve punished people over the past two or three years by demanding they be in the office five days a week when it’s clear they can do their job without that requirement, then when things turn back up again, they’re going to be gone.”

WYW should be canned immediately. What was the status quo before Corona…every one was able to manage the commute, came to work on time, did their job and went back home, took care of their cats, dogs and garden etc. For all those bragging that they would leave if WYW is scrapped…then oh please. If you didn’t leave till now with all that’s going on here, then you are just a whiff of hot gas. Save the planet some other way. I hope new leader scraps this expensive experiment and if that reduces the head count further then better that than firing honest workers.

Really @1ghj+1mGJ4etw?

WFH has given so many people time back with their families, has reduced commuting emissions for the planet, has woken people up to the hamster wheel companies have had us on for so long. It’s called realizing your job should not be your life.

WFH is being abused every M and F all 3M leaders deserve a large kick in the but for being to lax. All you hear from the work no way entitled crowd is "take it away and I will leave". Who cares! It is an unfair advantage that allows unfair cost savings, a de factor salary increase, and has created an imbalance in the work force the last 3 years and created a culture of resentment in the Factory's the groups that make money. There is a clear lack of leadership and large levels of quiet quitting and slacking already. This is proven in productivity declining and reflected in 3M stock price the last two years. Why so many of you WFH get to save vacation, claim WFH every weekend, even the managers, and go to Weddings, cabins all kinds of family stuff and do everything but work on Monday's and Friday's every summer. Go ahead and call the bluff HR. Nobody cares if there is a mass exodus at 3M Center of people quitting when there are large layoffs and people quitting will save more jobs of people that want to stay. With the job market all together tightening call the bluff.

There are senior management on generous Car allowances but they are working from the comfort of their homes and asking for reports via Teams meeting. How is that fair to the ground workers? How does HR plan to address this gap in fairness?

Work your way was an instant pay raise for those that qualified (lower car gas bill). I did not qualify for WYW and certainly did not receive a raise when it went into effect. Those of us that have to go into work every day have a big chip on our shoulder because of this. Give us an equivalent raise to make it equal!

It just doesn't make sense to retrench so many headcount, while on the other hand, allow people to work at the comfort of their homes. Just plain unfair.

Every survey 3M puts out, I always add "Thank you 3M for allowing me to work my way and do my part to lower my personal carbon footprint. This has been life, no, world changing in saving the planet." If you think i agree with this statement, that is up to you.

So if we go back to work it fixes the horrendous A3M nightmare, all of the Business Transformation, and all the SAP commercialization ki-ling processes it brought? Thanks, Dr. Zaius!

Work your way is definitely one of the only positives remaining at 3M. I get just as much if not more done from home without the stress and time of commute. My team is just as effective working remotely than in confined cubicles. The lame rods who think the downfall of 3M is due to "woke" ideas and work your way can continue watching their fox news and bi--hing at millennials, it won't do anything. Just a bunch of little whining conservatives.

If any HR is reading here, this is one way to reduce your workforce without paying severance package.

WYW has been a gift! I have limited mobility - the ability to work from home and interact with colleagues over Teams has given me greater job satisfaction and a strong sense of inclusiveness. Please keep WYW.

Take WYW away and immediately lose a good chunk of the millennial work force.

Amongst all the negative things about working in 3M these days, this is one the rare positives.

WYW or no WYW, there will always be slackers. It is the job of the manager to ensure that members of his / her team are working as per expectations.

Yeah if they take away Work Your Way, I’m out. I live over an hour away. Not a chance am I giving up my nature “office” and time with my cat in exchange for the concrete jungle of sadness.

The last good thing keeping me is Work Your Way. Mass exodus if they take it or start to require time in office. Even “landing” days. No one wants to drive if they don’t have to an hour or two every day. Sell the buildings you don’t need get some $ that way maybe. 220 could make cool retail!

How many of you remember the good old days of international meetings with 1/4 of the people in a conference room at the center and it took 10 minutes to get started? WYW has allowed our international counterparts to have a greater voice and have allowed many of us to get to know them well.

Our Team was actually more productive when we went WFH. Plus I’m giving the company 2 extra hours of work per day that I would spend commuting. If WFH is removed, I’ll seek a job elsewhere.

I agree that sadly, this is the end.

Excluding the lawsuits, look at what’s happened to the company over the past 3 years since the loss of personal contact and thinking that Teams can take care of communication. Mentoring is next to impossible over the phone as opposed to being next to someone. Food for thought.

The day that happens is the day I quit. The place is in a death spiral. Collecting that check and waiting for severance. In 5 years 3M will be all but gone. Broken off and sold to the highest bidder. It’ll be Single M will remain and be sandpaper, tape, and post-its. The rest will be devoured by Honeywell, PG, and the rest of them.

You're completely out of touch with reality if you think getting rid of work your way is a) a solution to the "slack" and b) going to help retain talent.

People don't want to drive in anymore. That world is gone. Forever. People can get just as much done at home as they can in the office. And if you get rid of it, all that will do is push more people to leave. It's been seen at several other companies who tried to force return to office.