8mo ago

Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking, and color-coding of employees

arstechnica.com Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking

Report claims new tracking starts May 13 with unclear consequences.

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.

Business @lemmy.world

Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking

arstechnica.com /information-technology/2024/05/dell-to-monitor-worker-vpn-use-badge-swipes-to-enforce-office-policy/

1 0

Technology @beehaw.org

Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking

arstechnica.com /information-technology/2024/05/dell-to-monitor-worker-vpn-use-badge-swipes-to-enforce-office-policy/

128 41

82 comments

“You must go in to the office, so that you can get on calls with your team or other teams, which are in the other global offices.” (rolling eyes)
- Where I work they are so fucking stupid they are making everyone go back to the office to 'foster collaboration' but all the seating is random - you sit somewhere new every day, first come first served. What useful tasks am I going to collaborate on with random people from all different parts of the company sitting around me each day? It shows that the executives are just fucking liars and aren't willing to tell the truth, which is that they need people spending money in the cities to help with their portfolios. Or they are just doing what everyone else is doing. Or they're just on a power trip. Or all of the above.
  
  Do the top executives also sit randomly with other colleagues?
  
  My current company stated that if you have a local office and want to go there fine, but otherwise do your job where it makes sense. Of course my boss is on one coast, the rest of my team is spread out in multiple states on the other coast, and I’m kind of in the middle of the country.
- That really is one of the most ridiculous parts. Even if your team is local, a huuuge amount of interaction is spread across tbe globe.
- A few months ago my director started discussions on return to office mandates. No one else really paid any attention.
  I went in today and nobody is here, including my director. I don't think anyone thinks the commute is worth the value they're pitching.
  I should have slept in an extra two hours.
  
  What happens if you just never go in? I'm so glad my office is in Denver and I am in New England.
- Worst are the meetings of international work groups. Stressful travel, being away from the family for days, sitting in a shitty meeting room talking about the same shit you talk about online and then sitting with a bunch of people getting senseless drunk, cringing constantly. I hate those meetings.
  Used to be so awesome during corona. Took 4-6 hours, comfortably sitting in my home office, now it takes 3 days costing maybe 50,000€, instead of 0€, without more results.
  
  I never went back to the office after the pandemic.
  I actually got really sick and had to spend a small amount of time in hospital, afterwards I might have slightly played up the emotional trauma to management so they couldn't try that BS. Eventually they did anyway I along with a lot of my colleagues quit and got another job straight away.
  Apparently they have now flip-flopped again and are back to permanent work from home for everyone who wants it. I wonder if losing a third of their work force in a month had something to do with that.

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.
- This is the right point to make... Instead of managing people by the work they do or the objectives they achieve, they are managing literally where their butts sit
- 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.

Did they think that'd give them good optics or do they just not care?
- So I've worked in business for 17ish years now, and the only consistent thing I can say about business leadership is they are there to have their egos stroked.
  They do not care about money or other people until they look bad, and even then they don't do anything until someone threatens to take away the group of people forced to listen to them.
  Working from home hurts their ego. This method (RTO) doesn't improve value and increases turnaround, which increases expenses if you are happy with the amount of people working for your company, as replacing people costs money.
  So either Dell still needs to get rid of people, or a bunch of old fucks need someone to suck up to them in person.
  
  Are their egos fragile because they know the people who do the real work are... not them?
  
  This came straight from Michael Dell, per multiple conversations with directors and managers at Dell. He's probably trying to squeeze out all the old employees to replace them with cheaper people. There's no clear reasoning at all, which means it's underhanded bullshit or he's a moron.
- They only care that it looks good to the out of touch, sociopathic management type
- It's a way to cut headcount without doing layoffs. It's usually followed one or two quarters later by an actual layoff.

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.

This sounds like a recipe for malicious compliance if I ever heard it.
- Many people chose a 'remote' role that requires no office visits but hamstrings your career growth. I know a bunch now enforcing 5PM as the end of their day. But there will always be happy worker bees.
  
  Many people chose a 'remote' role that requires no office visits but hamstrings your career growth.
  Not really. Everyone knows that in the business world the only way to reliably get a promotion is to switch companies anyway. So I can be on permanent work from home and then when I want a better job I can just switch to another company, that may or may not require me to go into the office sometimes. I can have my cake, and eat it.
  It is not the 1930s anymore, I don't have to work for the same company my entire life. Everyone but the business people seem to know this.
- Like, showing to work wearing a colored armband?

Idea: script that connects and disconnects from a VPN over and over at set intervals to send "fuck you" in Morse.
- Sigh would be nice but I have use a phone to sign-in plus a password.

If only they had been so rigorous in protecting customer data.
- Or making quality consumer products.

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.

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...

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.

Just another huge ass company that values short term profits over its employees and customers. Probably won’t be buying any more of their products.
- Dell more like Dull
  
  Dud! You’re getting a Dull.
- I could never own a dell. as far as I'm concerned, they make crazy overpriced laptops that are pretty much guaranteed to need 200$ of maintenance down the road when the hinges inevitably fail.
  
  I still remember having to operate on their old desktops with the snap-down clamshell design. Infuriating.

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.

The only marginally logical excuse i've heard for RTO is to justify rented office space.
- 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?
  
  What the Delly-Os
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Which companies pay for WFH expenses? I worked for the biggest software company in the world in 2022 and there was no WFH allowance. We were 100% WFH at that point.
- 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.
- 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.

Color coding people? So they are doing a caste system?
- It's just pieces of flair. Brian, for example, has thirty seven pieces of flair, okay.
- They're queuing people for "priority layoffs". Also, more heavily automating worker productivity metrics.
  If you're in the "bad" batch, there's no reason you shouldn't start looking for another job. Plenty of employers are offering remote work and if Dell doesn't want you someone else will take you.

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

Budget for monsy spent on pizza parties, etc to encourage workers back to office: $0
Budget for money spent on tracking and whipping employees based on managerial whims: Infinite
Folks, has corporate culture become a cancer on society?
- Folks, has corporate culture become a cancer on society?
  Become?

Hello comrade
- Ha 😃. This was my first thought as well. I just shared the link to a friend of mine working for "Friend Computer" to ask him what class of citizen he was going to be.

Dell will track employees' badge swipes and VPN connections to confirm that workers are in the office for a significant amount of time.
So if you need a tracking system or you wouldn't know if they were in the office or not, why do you need them office?

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".

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 ?

The Nanny State

82 comments