Just curious if this new CEO is going to mandate people to come to the office like other companies are already doing. I know work your way was a MR thing. Sure working from home benefits the employee but given how 3M is doing I don't think it's good for the company.
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Only a new CEO can make this major policy change. Let's hope he does the right thing and weed out those who exploit WYW.
WYW was a great flexible asset for honest employees , but it now looks as though it will be phased out in certain areas as it is not viable anymore, too many gaps in work not being done and deadlines being missed by months, Q2 is going to be shocking
And the poster below is an entitled blow hard who will be crying when their remote job is moved to India.
Our plant is now training planners from another country.
You see, we can protect manufacturing jobs with taxes and tariffs.
How can you protect your job from being shipped overseas?
Better get back in the office, kiss some butt, maybe 3M sales would finally start climbing again with a full, present effort.
Plant losers are just jealous and remorseful about their career decisions. Get to work losers
Other than that its just the brown nosers who think its more important to be seen at the center than to get work done. I know a young lady from segment marketing who be there every day kissing every ar-e she can get her lips close to and it makes me wanna pu-e.
Why is everyone fixated on Work Your Way! It’s simply a tool to provide flexibility to employees! The expectation on work output never changed from supervisors! Infact I was working more from home! It’s hilarious that people are using a flexible work model as the guinea pig to place blame on! 3M’s issue is years of under investment in growth platforms! All their P&L leaders lack any sort of growth chops! All they know is how to sell the same Post-it note in a different color and size!
You keep talking about regional roles….Exactly what position are you talking about? I am on a global role and am on calls from 6am to 9pm most days.
If I have 2-3 hours of calls in the evening, sure I may go run errands during the day but am always reachable on Teams
I know of regional people who only have about 2-4 hours per day in meetings. Other than that, the person has all the free time to run errands. Mind you these are JG15+ roles
If I have to go the office full time daily then who is going to take care of my pets, lawn, kids, stock market investments, basement renovations, kids school project, online education etc. etc. Since last three years I am working from my home sweet home. I am already scared if WYW will change.
L3Harris gives better "merit increases" to those who visit the office regularly. One way to offer WYW until participation drops off due to financial incentives to be in the office. Then a few years later it can be dropped due to "low participation." Certain people abusing WYW is the reason while it will eventually go away. Just like the few people driving off without paying for gasoline made pay in advance the norm.
Unfortunately A3M is probably be here to stay. Fewer people, longer hours. Get people to be on a call until 11 PM with Asia and be ready to talk EMEA at 6 AM. Yes you will be able to take these calls from home, but you still need report into the office. They will check badge access.
I don't think it was the Great Recession that began the end of 3M as we know it, but rather the hiring of Wall Street God Mcnerney in December 2000.
Jimmy Mac decided shareholders (and his personal bank account) were more important than employees and customers.
The Jack Welch forced ranking system was an anathema for a 3M culture that valued collaboration. While it took years, the death rattle is here.
Sad to see the imminent death of a 20th icon, but no amount of mourning will fix what is broken irreparably.
I have been with 3M for over three decades now. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good was the 90’s and early 2000’s.
I witnessed happy employees. The company genuinely cared for the employees with a motto, Our Employees Are Our Most Valuable Asset. Company outings, parties, picnics, bbqs were the norm. There was a constant focus on the customer and the technical staff were allowed 15% of their day to develop new products and solutions for our customers. Sales were increasing every year. People felt safe and secure in their jobs.
The bad began around the 2008 crisis. It was the catalyst that really propelled most of the outsourcing/ off shoring manufacturing. North American workers that made a decent living were being replaced with production workers from developing countries. At that time 3M production employees were being paid $9 a day in Mexico, and $4 an hour in China. Capital Investment came to a trickle in North America. If you were an executive in this period, you made out like a bandit for making those tough decisions. It was the way of the time. If you didn’t follow, your competitors would leave you behind. The stock continued to do well, company outings became less and less, and many employees lost that sense of security as plant closures, consolidation, and layoffs in North America and Europe happened. Lab experiments, trials, and new product development seemed to take a back seat in North America as most capital was focused on developing overseas. Sales continued to climb and profits soared eventually.
The ugly. The pandemic, the ear plug suit, the contaminated water suit.
Billions in payouts. It would appear they are salvaging the profitable healthcare division by splitting off into Solventum in a couple weeks. What will become of the remaining 80% industrial giant is a mystery. A new leader to bring it back to life, or put it to rest?
Our sales have been stagnant for a few years now.
Interesting. It just occurred to me. When I started at 3M over 3 decades ago, our price point was always higher than our competitors. That was our schtick. We made a high quality top notch product. It was supported by many brilliant technical people developed in our labs, produced in North American factories with care, and delivered on time to our valued customers that sought out the best quality and knew they could count on 3M.
Somewhere we lost our way.
Let’s hope our new leader values employees and a refocus on the customer.
Just some old b-m off the factory floor.
Perhaps in some bygone era when 3M was a highly collaborative organization with a robust innovation engine, regular daily face-to-face interaction amongst technical personnel was important to keeping the new product idea hopper full. That has not been the case at 3M in well over a decade. Any more than “15% time” exists in the current 3M. The lack of innovation in the company is simply gross. Sadly, WYW is entirely consistent with barely incremental class 3 R&D projects the dominate the pipeline. You don’t need in-person interaction to tweak an adhesive, change a liner/backing, swap out an RM, make packaging changes, or create a new SKU.
3M is shell of its former self and it’s never going to return.
@Sad in St. Paul
Totally agree with you. I was an external hire (senior-level) in 2019 and the culture was autrocious. On my first day as a Director I was told the hours I MUST be visible in the office and literally treated like an intern. The level of micromanaging was obscene. SVPs had to approve Director-level ppt. slides. Maybe is they had spent more time actually managing the business, rather than putting the boot to the necks of everyone we might not find ourselves where we are today.
The unfairness is that those regional JG15+ get to work at the comfort of their home, while the worker levels have to work in plant daily. Such a big disparity.
ID: @3gmn+1ryXOVrG
I respectfully disagree with your post. Based on my experience, WYW did not destroy the 3M culture or camaraderie at 3M. I started at 3M in early 2019. The culture was already toxic when I started at 3M.
As for camaraderie, there was no camaraderie when I started at 3M. I was left on my own after the first week at 3M. I was excluded from lunches, dinners and more. I was the new person but even the rest of the team did not get along.
WYW made things better for the team. Working remotely stopped the gossip and everyone focused on work. The global members of our team felt included for the first time. Sadly, we could not escape the toxicity of our SVP by working remotely but at least virtual harassment is better than in-person harassment.
I would say it’s more than that. Think of folks new to company new to roles, sometimes it’s difficult to learn and grow virtually. WYW has destroyed the culture. There is very little culture and camaraderie around 3M and that is sad.
From what I can tell, the entire "debate" around WYW is basically plant guys complaining that it's not fair they need to come in if other people don't, and friendless tools demanding people come in to the office because they're lonely.
There's no actual reason why we need to abandon WYW.
It is not always a strictly either/or proposition...
Working in the lab, I have several colleagues that work nearly 100% WFH as their days are spent on the endless paperwork 3M has gotten to like so much for things like product changes, documentation updates, RM substitutions/discontinuations, etc. Often times the actual lab work for this stuff is zero or nearly so. Others do tons of computer work like modeling or CAD which does not need to be onsite so much either. But yes there are some that abuse it. Hard to say you are a research chemist in 201 and work remote more than 1 day a week...
I would like to see people onsite more, but I understand why some can and do work remotely. The flexibility is nice, for sure. And the rest of the work experience is trash here these days, so you take what little benefit you can get.
Pay freeze is not such a bad idea. I remember back in 2008 we took a 3 year pay freeze as jobs were being off shored. Salaried staff continued to get their raises. Now the pay gap between salaried and hourly is absurd, plus the work from home option with no travel expense.
The litmus test is this. Is working from home benefitting the customer....or yourself?
If you can honestly answer yes to both, a win/ win situation then you have an argument.
Quartly sales have been stagnet for too long....for a reason. Time to get back to the office and grow this company.
"Many jobs need to be 100% on-site, including most plant staff. Those workers should see increased pay and time off to offset the requirement."
It seems to me that instead of spending more money by providing extra compensation to those that have to work on-site (pre-covid norm for all) they should look at reducing compensation or time off for those that now have the extra benefit of WYW. Perhaps let them chose to continue to WYW with a pay freeze for a period of time going forward or get back to work!
Here is my view:
Many jobs need to be 100% on-site, including most plant staff. Those workers should see increased pay and time off to offset the requirement. The extra time off is to allow flexibility for doctor's appointments and the like.
Some jobs can be mostly on-site (say 80%). Examples here are lab and sales. They can honestly average 4 days of week on the bench/calling on customers and 1 day a week on lab reports/calls/internal meetings.
A lot of other roles can be done mostly or entirely remote. (Marketing, most IT, most sourcing, etc.)
What 3M should really do is just lay down hard guidelines based on each person's role and adjust pay some to compensate people for going on-site versus their remote colleagues.
I agree with the comment that if you are mostly remote, your company car is gone. That isn't a US problem however as basically only outside sales get any cars.
Ironically , most of the managers with 1-2 K $ transport allowance are never seen in office . Maybe appear 1-2 times a quarter for meeting .
What a joke !
I can understand WYW for global roles, crazy conf call times and all, but for those US only roles, time to get back to the office. I always felt this program was rolled out way too early. I was even more confused when they rolled out vaccine mandate, when majority of company was WYW. One of the many puzzling exec decisions…
absolute joke is what WYW is, I work 12 hour shifts day and night, my body has not recovered from this torment for the last 15 years and then management bring in new rules we cannot eat or drink at our workstations even though we are dedicated to being at the machines for 12 hours, also although i am a non smoker a new rule has been brought in to make our plant a non smoking plant. Now employees have been told to clock out at lunchtime for a cigarette which is very harsh on smokers. Silly new rules which American employees are fed up with. Everyone should be on the plants,, nobody should be working from home now, it was a covid rule so has no bearing anymore, hope the new C.E.O. changes this.
WYY is a joke. My planner would work from home every Thursday. I could never get him to answer an email or take a phone call. It was just an extra day off.
Lab employees were working from home.....how do you do that?
Us grunts in the trenches watched all through COVID, the "important people" that made double our wage were allowed to stay home, while we had to report to the factory to keep 3M product pumping out. Their travel costs went way down. We got a $300 bonus for working through the pandemic.
Now the entitled highly paid group thinks I believe how hard they are working in between grocery shopping and picking up their kids....Sales are flat for a reason.
Let's hear you example of WYW abuse.
WYW should have never been introduced as an option. It's up to each of us to manage our lives and not to expect the world to revolve around us. This genie is out of the bottle so not sure where this will land. But in any event, we have to deal with the results. Just done with all of this.
There are plenty of people in offices not working 8 hours a day.
@2fux+1ryXOVrG, I’m in calls ~70% of the day and I’m very lucky if I can get this and everything else packed into an 8h work day. My typical work week is about 45-50h and I’m going into these calls at 9pm with MN, CR, MX and at 7am with Singapore and China. For sure I’m doing house work and eating dinner in between. Don’t try to tell me that I’m not working enough from home, that’s absolute BS.
The real 3M problem is about missing investments and our focus on cost savings. We are rather saving the 150k than investing it for an efficiency boost of 500k-1M/year, THATS the issue that is bringing us down, slowly but surely.
Don't tell me you have straight 8 hours call in a day..... I've heard of Wfh people who take naps in between, run errands, do housework all within office hours. Truly " working their way"
WYW is a great program and one that should stay. I never work in my PJs, work 50+ hours a week and work with a global team.
Im working from home in Europe with colleagues all around the world, only one of my colleagues is in the same office as I would be. I can drive to the office for one hour and make my international calls from there, but then don’t expect me to take calls at 7am or 7pm from home anymore.
This doesn’t make any sense.
Incent WYW to come into the office…perhaps it’s their monthly payroll deposit…just a thought. I get WYW didn’t break 3M, but don’t think it helped either.
Does anyone know if currently L3Harris is also on remote work, or they are back to office? This could give an indication.
If WYW is to continue they need to give all the workers that are in the trenches an incentive to come in. There's so much dysfunction in the plants and leadership who makes decisions and they're not even on campus! Especially at 3M center!
When WYW was introduced I was told that it did not apply to me and then I was required to click a button that said I understood that it was available to me.
So for me the WYW benefit is and always has been a load of horsesh-t. However just because my manager is a tool it doesn't mean I think everyone who does get to use the WYW benefit should suddenly have to stop.
@qnw+1ryXOVrG: Well said. WYW didn’t cause 3M’s issues any more than bringing back Lotus Notes will solve them.
Seriously? You really think WYW is why 3M isn’t doing well? Pull your head out of your MAGA hat. 3M is failing because of incompetent leadership, a lazy board, unsustainable litigation costs, and defunding innovation. None of that gets fixed from bringing bodies into buildings. Can we PLEASE bring in a new generation of leadership!?
Quite true for the APAC regional offices. They are not extending leases and keeping the JG15+ at the comfort of their home.
I guess we'll see, but it seems like work your way is one of the few things 3M still has going for it to retain (some) talent
I think they will keep WYW and try to use it to attract the cheaper rehires as they go through more years of the regularly anticipated cuts. I imagine they will ditch a lot of buildings and sell off land instead.