I wonder how many people went through the hiring process and stated that WFH was a condition of accepting the job. It is a perk for those lucky enough to get it nothing more.
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Once you get WFH employees coming into a collaboration zone, you can now move that zone. Chicago has Schaumburg, Lisle, Park Ridge and could move all of them downtown. You can then attract younger employees that don't want to commute to 'burbia. I think that's one of their goals.
@bbe excellent post! There is no VP in Dallas has that a clue what jobs could/should be done from a home location. This mandate to send folks into an office should not come from that high of a level, it should be up to the individual supervisor for their respective group. And if there are people taking advantage, those individuals should be addressed directly. Poor leadership from above.
@1exj: what you have described is a problem that AT&T has had for decades. They do not know how to manage and/or are not allowed to manage, so bad performers continue to remain employed. That goes for in office workers or work from home workers, there is no difference! Either they are doing the job, or they are not!
The problem from WFH some people are really good at it but many others are not. We had 6 admins working from home email was delayed Q chat was also delayed and all phone calls went to VM. Kids screaming in the background when they did answer it sounded great on conf calls.
WFH vs employees and contractos located all over the world the are part of teams located state side, what is the difference? Anyone know if all the TechM resources are even located in ATT buildings in India? I ask the same question about these other firms with large amount of contractors located in other countries.
When I was hired (all phone interviews) it wasn't even asked. I live in a different part of the country from the hiring manager. I was a contractor before that and did a mixture of WFH and office work. My hiring manager at that time was fine with WFH. For many years, I've been in the position of being many states and time zones away from my manager. Our team was equally distributed across the nation. A few years ago, when the encoding for workspaces was done, I discussed the fact that I live quite a distance from the collaboration zone, and was told to pick FOW because it was easier than trying to get TW approved, but the understanding was that I would be WFH. I was always honest with my managers, who have changed over the years due to reorgs, but the distributed work environment situation has remained constant throughout. I don't know how true the rumors are about t "entrapping" employees via VPN usage... if I get picked for the next surplus, I'll just move on . I'm not worrying or obsessing about it. There's not much I can do . There are other opportunities and other companies, should an ATT surplus come to pass for me. I've prepared myself for that eventuality. By the way... I work many more hours weekly than most people and more than I ever could if I had to commute to a collaboration zone, especially to collaborate with people in another time zone. So if AT&T doesn't want to leverage that, shame on them and it really will be their problem, not mine. I will move on quietly and peacefully, knowing that there are other good opportunities to be leveraged.
Unless your job requires physical presence to work on the front line to delight our customers, there is no reason it can't be done while WFH with the technology we have. Between email, phone, Q, WebEx, screensharing, SharePoint, tSpace, and on and on, we can effectively collaborated regardless of location. This of course assumes that your not a scummy worker who abuses WFH by treating it as an excuse to slack off. I get the feeling that most of detractors here are those types of people and assume that everyone else is too. The reality is that that should be handled by supervisors on an individual basis, we dont need to throw out the baby and the bathwater.
Sorry but how many folks have they hired stateside in the last 5 years. Bangalore, please do the needful.
Software developers do not need to be in an office to get their job done and to do it well. This is the year 2019, some of you need to wake up and get out of the dark ages!
I doubt any were hired that asked if they could WFH. I interviewed someone who asked that and it was a real turnoff. We wanted someone excited about working for us. They didn't present themselves in that way.
If you're job can be done from home, it can be done from Timbuktu. Technology.