Dell Sales team told to return to office 5 days a week
Dell Sales team told to return to office 5 days a week
arstechnica.com
Dell sales team told to return to office 5 days a week, starting Monday
116 comments
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Alternative headlines:
- Dell wants to contribute to global warming for no good reason.
- Dell wants to expose workers to death by automobile for no real reason.
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Dell looking to cut workforce without layoffs.
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We need an alternative headlines community
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global warming
When WFH began, I stopped taking the subway into the city every day and instead spent a lot more time driving around the suburbs. My car's mileage and my ecological footprint went way up. You can't just make up a statement and have it be true.
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I too have an anecdote. If only someone had done research on the topic and we had a way to search for it.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022AV000732
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You are so clearly the exception is should not even have to be made clear.
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Lol, "my personal anecdotal story, means someone else is crazy and wrong, despite me having no other evidence either."
- This person
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What are you doing where you have to drive around aimlessly?
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Did the people collating stats forget to take into account your hobbies? I feel like there was nothing forcing you to drive aimlessly around the burbs more than you would have normally outside of work, shopping and errands taking the same time as normal.
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The world is not flat, stop spreading misinformation.
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So Dell wants to do a layoff of sales staff, and is going to lose their best performers first.
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Dell's inside sales team probably has a much flatter bell curve, performance wise, then their outside (traveling) reps.
So yes, they are looking to do a layoff without the headlines, or severance, but probably aren't as concerned where on the bell curve those employees rank.
Middle and lower management of those teams is absolutely sweating bullets about their teams getting wrecked, but big picture, whatever impact the C Suite is expecting, clearly isn't enough to outweigh whatever net outcome they're hoping for here.
Edit: also, I pretty much guarantee that any of their far high-end outliers on the inside sales team bell curve, will be given an exemption by whoever is 2 or 3 levels above their direct manager.
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They already laid off a bunch.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dell-cuts-workers-sales-team-170000115.html
I guess not enough.
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i hate how this "best performers" rhetoric always comes out in WFH discussion. everyone should be able to work from home if it's better for them regardless of if they're The Best at their dunder-mifflin ass job
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Sure, everyone that has a job that can be done from home should be permitted to do it from home if they want to.
What the best performers rhetoric is about is that these companies are harming their long term prospects by doing things like this, since the personnel that make the most money for the company are generally the ones that can easily leave for another company that will not treat them like a child that needs to be directly monitored.
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That's not the argument. The argument is rather that good employees can easily find new and better jobs. So the remaining people are on average worse.
It's also called Dead Sea Effect. The good ones evaporate, only salt remains.
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They are saying the return to office mandate will cause the best performers (who are likely more confident in securing another job) to quit first, not that everyone shouldn't be WFH.
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Why the fuck would any office worker whose job is 100% on a computer need to be in an office? I don't understand why companies want to pay for all of that electricity and real estate just to make people sit in cubicles.
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To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.
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Sociopathy, mostly.
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Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.
Yes, it's a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can't just roll up to someone's desk and be like "have a minute?" (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you're running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.
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I just have slack running on my phone. If I'm at IKEA instead of my computer and someone wants something, I'll just tell them I'll take a look at it after lunch. If I'm out biking in the afternoon, I just tell them I'll take a look at it tomorrow morning.
If someone wants something really urgently, I'll tell them to give me thirty minutes. Thirty minutes later I'll tell them that the results are inconclusive and this will need more time, for which I have scheduled a block for tomorrow.
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“have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway)
For us at the current job it becomes "hey, I need help with the Pinske file; throw me a call or a meeting when you can, please? Thanks!" and soon enough they or their meeting-req will pop up. And yeah, we'll set a 15-min meeting for 8 minutes from now because it's easy.
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So managers and other poor personality types have someone to torment. This is said flippantly but I'm quite serious.
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probably because their cost is sunk in the real estate already and no one wants to buy it.
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I'll go out on a little limb, it might be sales specific. My company is 100% work from home. All the engineers and product and design work remote, maybe come into the office once a week just because.
The sales team however is strongly encouraged to come in as much as possible. I think it's a morale thing. Sales teams become these weird cults, maybe necessarily. It's really hard to pick up the phone and make a call when you've been rejected 5 times in a row. The teams little ceremonies are designed to help push through that.
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Especially in sales and finance: every call is potentially on the record, and that's a problem.
A lot of internal communication in these departments is, to put it mildly, legally not without interest. A quick chat after a meeting is completely off the record, an email is not.
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Quick answer to that......you forget everything said off the record.
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I know I'll be downvoted, but I'll answer your question.
"Need" is a strong word. Sure, it's not needed. But that's not what the business tends to care about. They care about productivity.
I work in software. In my previous job I was a one man show. For my day to day development, I didn't need to interact with other people much. When I shifted to remote working it was a huge boost because I got protected time to work where I wasn't distracted by other people in the office, either socially or incidentally. This case it worked very well.
After the pandemic I switched jobs into one with a hybrid schedule. Luckily for me my job is a 15 minute bike commute.
However, the suite of tools I'm now developing and working on require me to constantly interact with other people in the office. I also spend a lot of time mentoring jr devs.
This is, quite frankly, just better when we're all in the office. The jr devs know, explicitly, that they can bother me whenever they need it. In the office this happens probably an average of 8 times a day. When either of us is remote, it's probably once a day.
Now with the other senior devs, we hate meetings. However, all the time, spontaneously, we'll end up chatting in our little section about the development of the system, someone will overhear (maybe even from an adjacent group) and chime in with useful knowledge. Next thing you know we have 4 or 5 devs whiteboarding and discussing things. Most of the fine tuning of our systems get hashed out in these impromptu meetings. This never happens when we're remote.
Also the barrier to just turning around and asking someone something is so much lower. Often 30 seconds. Because at home I have to send them a message, maybe message back and forth a bit before determining that it would be easier on zoom, then we have to jump on zoom which takes a small amount of time. Now this is not some huge thing, but it is a barrier that makes it just hard enough that he happens way less frequently.
Working in the office is just better for productivity in this type of situation, which i imagine is true for most jobs that involve lots of collaboration. Almost all of my coworkers agree. We also all agree that remote is better because commuting sucks. It honestly even boggles my mind to hear other software devs argue that they are more productive at home. Believable if we are talking about my original situation, or if you're just mindlessly closing tickets. But for collaborative development of large systems? No way.
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So essentially you're saying that communication falls apart and you don't have the correct tools for remote work.
That's fine, it's a new issue to solve, no one has it perfectly done yet.
I completely sympathise with this, I have experienced it when I was a stonemason for 10 years (I say stonemason, I am a qualified banker mason but I have been programming machines to do the work for me). And I overhear and interject my experience with the new lads often. But now I'm at university 3 days a week and everything has fallen apart.
So we use discord, where we can all talk and ask advice about how to do X but not need to be in person. And in my experience it works exactly the same, I can read everyone's input and offer my own.
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Unironically how I live my life
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Quite right too. The most important factor for me when buying a computer is that the sales droid is in an office. All those CPU, RAM and disk numbers are secondary to that.
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Because making calls and using a computer requires a specific lacale...
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lmaoooo Murica is just 10 companies in a trenchcoat pretending to be a country
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They would ask you to return to the ashes if the office burnt down.
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I used to work for a major business outsourcer. One of their contingency plans in case an office burned down or had to be evacuated was literally to make everybody work in another office 50 miles away.
It was so bad that they weren't even willing to reimburse travel costs. It was either get there or be fired.
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And in an unlikely turn of fate, the backup office burned down too.
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It just might
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I question those studies. It's way easier to get someone's attention in office than emailing them 3-4x. Additionally teamwork definitely increases when you work face to face at least sometimes.
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Don’t email 3-4x. Just write a chat message and send ab VC invite. Works immediately in 90% of all cases and allows direct communication without disturbing all the coworkers around you in an office.
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I agree to an extent, but while I'm not going to speak for everyone as my situation is unique, my role is as an individual contributor, and my role requires absolutely 0 teamwork. I have a set of tasks that need to be done by EOD, and so does the rest of my team. We don't collaborate at all. When we were in office, the only benefit was we all sat together, so you could ask a team member for assistance if you got stuck on a unique issue.
During Covid, they redid our office. There are no assigned seats anymore. So when they do ask us to come in, I work at a random desk by myself. It's absolutely stupid. I'm wasting gas and time driving to the office just to make an appearance to stroke management's ego so they can physically see me in person.
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I agree but only if your team is in the same office. Nowadays people are working with teams based around the world and if your entire team is working remotely then there's not much point to being in the office.
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It's way easier to get someone's attention in office
Exactly. Most employees aren't just sitting around waiting for someone to get their attention. They're already actively working. And when that work is interrupted, it's a distraction, and productivity goes down.
Even the mental context switching between the tasks is costly in terms of time lost. Most people can't just instantly jump back to the original task at the same level of productivity.
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E-mail is not, nor was it ever, something for immediate response. Don't e-mail people if you want one, you're doing it wrong.
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I quit answering my dell sales buy. His quotes have been above what I can get buying right off the website. Their premier login must tack on a 25% charge.
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Lenovo produces what dell wishes it could.
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We just test piloted a few for the first time since IBM stopped making them. I was really disappointed when one had a fan problem just outside of warranty, I went ahead and cracked it open. It was all Phillips screws which was kind of nice. They weren't all the same which kind of sucks but not that bad. I went to pull the fan out to get a replacement, found out I had to replace the entire fan assembly heat pipes heat sinks everything. I was super pissed off until I found out I could buy the part off their website and it was 80 bucks. Dell won't even sell me parts. 80 boxes a lot to pay for a fan, But when replacing it replaces both the CPU and the GPU fan and gives me fresh radiators, It could be worse.
From a corporate standpoint I'm a fan.
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Working at a computer shop, Lenovo ThinkPads are usually pretty fine, but the main fault we've seen with them is lack or completely missing thermal compound. On one occasion I saw my colleague's machine not post, and IIRC we had to reset the CMOS to get it back up.
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I totally get it. Good luck though, make sure you find a landing space first. WFH jobs are decreasing and are getting much more competitive. They're also, unfortunately, prone to be suddenly or slowly shifted to in-office positions. Trying to work a mandatory period of WFH into your contract might be useful, but that'll be pretty difficult.
As long as you are very employable and in the right field you should be fine. Using "transitional WFH" as a way to entice workers is becoming more commonplace and employers are often not transparent about it.
A friend works in HR at a place that hires as "WFH" and doesn't mention at any point that there is already a timeline in place for two days in office after six weeks and then full time in office after three months. It's not stipulated anywhere, it's a "new policy" that comes down... on the same timeline... for every new employee. Lol
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How about crustaceans?
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well I'm unemployed and fucked
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Unless it's the initial outreach team or on-premises staff, sales would be one of the few roles totally suited to remote working.
Some of the more creative or collaborative roles I can see the argument for hybrid working - even if it's just one day a week or month in the office - but sales, customer service, or first line support seems to be the last area you'd impose a return to work mandate on.
That said, I haven't got extortionate office rents to justify 😂
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I'm beginning to think companies are doing this to get people to leave by themselves
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The most important lesson I have learned throughout my career is that large corporations are not worth working for. Too much "HR" interference.
The best work environments I have ever been a part of is when I worked for smaller businesses that were still made up of actual people and not nameless/faceless/soulless "corporate HR departments", who's sole purpose is to "make corpo more money no matter the means".
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I'd say it depends on what you want from a job. I've mostly been able to do nothing 90% of the time and still make good money. That 10% earns my share because it's often brutally stressful. But I can hide amongst the bureaucracy.
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More like "sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched."
I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.
Every place I've worked, every place that a place I've worked has had as a client, and every business I've ever visited had the same problem -- sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.
When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren't enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.
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Time to fire half the workforce.
Before you do that... I have a better idea
This is how they cull us now. Make us quit.
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That's how you get rid of the good people who can easily get a job somewhere else.
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It’s creeping back in the UK here too. I think hybrid works best for me, can collaborate 2 or 3 times a week and stay at home and be more productive to actually DO the work.
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Sales Team tells Dell to return to Linkedin?
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WFH was a £6.6k tax free bonus a year for me.
I hope it never ends
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Damn, you know it’s bad when Dell is laying off a ton of people through policy.
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And businesses that need salespeople are salivating right now.
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Is there a way to rank tech companies on how shitty they are? I'd love some kind of directory of companies and all the cunty things they have done in the last few years - like uncov but for established companies.
116 comments