work from home – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Employees Are Feeling Burned Over Broken Work-From-Home Promises As Employers Try To Bring Them Back To The Office

from the working-form-home dept

As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers over remote work.

A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C. magazine that suggested workers could lose benefits like health care if they insist on continuing to work remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. The staff reacted by refusing to publish for a day.

While the CEO later apologized, she isn?t alone in appearing to bungle the transition back to the office after over a year in which tens of millions of employees were forced to work from home. A recent survey of full-time corporate or government employees found that two-thirds say their employers either have not communicated a post-pandemic office strategy or have only vaguely done so.

As workforce scholars, we are interested in teasing out how workers are dealing with this situation. Our recent research found that this failure to communicate clearly is hurting morale, culture and retention.

Workers relocating

We first began investigating workers? pandemic experiences in July 2020 as shelter-in-place orders shuttered offices and remote work was widespread. At the time, we wanted to know how workers were using their newfound freedom to potentially work virtually from anywhere.

We analyzed a dataset that a business and technology newsletter attained from surveying its 585,000 active readers. It asked them whether they planned to relocate during the next six months and to share their story about why and where from and to.

After a review, we had just under 3,000 responses, including 1,361 people who were planning to relocate or had recently done so. We systematically coded these responses to understand their motives and, based on distances moved, the degree of ongoing remote-work policy they would likely need.

We found that a segment of these employees would require a full remote-work arrangement based on the distance moved from their office, and another portion would face a longer commute. Woven throughout this was the explicit or implicit expectation of some degree of ongoing remote work among many of the workers who moved during the pandemic.

In other words, many of these workers were moving on the assumption ? or promise ? that they?d be able to keep working remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic ended. Or they seemed willing to quit if their employer didn?t oblige.

One of authors explains the research.

We wanted to see how these expectations were being met as the pandemic started to wind down in March 2021. So we searched online communities in Reddit to see what workers were saying. One forum proved particularly useful. A member asked, ?Has your employer made remote work permanent yet or is it still in the air?? and went on to share his own experience. This post generated 101 responses with a good amount of detail on what their respective individual companies were doing.

While this qualitative data is only a small sample that is not necessarily representative of the U.S. population at large, these posts allowed us to delve into a richer understanding of how workers feel, which a simple stat can?t provide.

We found a disconnect between workers and management that starts with but goes beyond the issue of the remote-work policy itself. Broadly speaking, we found three recurring themes in these anonymous posts.

1. Broken remote-work promises

Others have also found that people are taking advantage of pandemic-related remote work to relocate to a city at a distance large enough that it would require partial or full-time remote work after people return to the office.

A recent survey by consulting firm PwC found that almost a quarter of workers were considering or planning to move more than 50 miles from one of their employer?s main offices. The survey also found 12% have already made such a move during the pandemic without getting a new job.

Our early findings suggested some workers would quit their current job rather than give up their new location if required by their employer, and we saw this actually start to occur in March.

One worker planned a move from Phoenix to Tulsa with her fianc? to get a bigger place with cheaper rent after her company went remote. She later had to leave her job for the move, even though ?they told me they would allow me to work from home, then said never mind about it.?

Another worker indicated the promise to work remotely was only implicit, but he still had his hopes up when leaders ?gassed us up for months saying we?d likely be able to keep working from home and come in occasionally? and then changed their minds and demanded employees return to the office once vaccinated.

2. Confused remote-work policies

Another constant refrain we read in the worker comments was disappointment in their company?s remote-work policy ? or lack thereof.

Whether workers said they were staying remote for now, returning to the office or still unsure, we found that nearly a quarter of the people in our sample said their leaders were not giving them meaningful explanations of what was driving the policy. Even worse, the explanations sometimes felt confusing or insulting.

One worker complained that the manager ?wanted butts in seats because we couldn?t be trusted to [work from home] even though we?d been doing it since last March,? adding: ?I?m giving my notice on Monday.?

Another, whose company issued a two-week timeline for all to return to the office, griped: ?Our leadership felt people weren?t as productive at home. While as a company we?ve hit most of our goals for the year. ? Makes no sense.?

After a long period of office shutterings, it stands to reason workers would need time to readjust to office life, a point expressed in recent survey results. Employers that quickly flip the switch in calling workers back and do so with poor clarifying rationale risk appearing tone-deaf.

It suggests a lack of trust in productivity at a time when many workers report putting in more effort than ever and being strained by the increased digital intensity of their job ? that is, the growing number of online meetings and chats.

And even when companies said they wouldn?t require a return to the office, workers still faulted them for their motives, which many employees described as financially motivated.

?We are going hybrid,? one worker wrote. ?I personally don?t think the company is doing it for us. ? I think they realized how efficient and how much money they are saving.?

Only a small minority of workers in our sample said their company asked for input on what employees actually want from a future remote work policy. Given that leaders are rightly concerned about company culture, we believe they are missing a key opportunity to engage with workers on the issue and show their policy rationales aren?t only about dollars and cents.

3. Corporate culture ?BS?

Management gurus such as Peter Drucker and other scholars have found that corporate culture is very important to binding together workers in an organization, especially in times of stress.

A company?s culture is essentially its values and beliefs shared among its members. That?s harder to foster when everyone is working remotely.

That?s likely why corporate human resource executives rank maintaining organizational culture as their top workforce priority for 2021.

But many of the forum posts we reviewed suggested that employer efforts to do that during the pandemic by orchestrating team outings and other get-togethers were actually pushing workers away, and that this type of ?culture building? was not welcome.

[_Like what you?ve read? Want more?_ Sign up for The Conversation?s daily newsletter.]

One worker?s company ?had everyone come into the office for an outdoor luncheon a week ago,? according to a post, adding: ?Idiots.?

Surveys have found that what workers want most from management, on the issue of corporate culture, are more remote-work resources, updated policies on flexibility and more communication from leadership.

As another worker put it, ?I can tell you, most people really don?t give 2 flips about ?company culture? and think it?s BS.?

Kimberly Merriman, Professor of Management, Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell; David Greenway, Doctoral Candidate in Leadership/Organization Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Tamara Montag-Smit, Assistant Professor of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Filed Under: covid, employers, promises, remote working, work from home

How Linus Torvalds Invented Today's Work From Home Paradigm In 1991

from the way-of-the-penguin dept

Working from home is beginning to move from being a necessary but temporary way of achieving social distancing in offices, to a radical shift in how many companies will operate. Until now, most of the evidence of that change has been anecdotal. But a Twitter thread by Chris Herd, who is CEO of FirstbaseHQ, which “lets you supply, finance and manage all the physical equipment your remote teams need to do great work at home”, provides some fascinating statistics on the scale of the shift to working from home. Herd says he has talked to around 1000 companies over the last six months about their plans for remote work. One trend is that corporate headquarters are “finished”, he says: companies will cut their commercial office space by 40 to 60%, with people working from home for two to four days each week. Some 30% of the companies Herd talked to say that they intend to get rid of offices completely, and move fully to remote working.

Some of the reasons for this shift are obvious. Things like increasing worker satisfaction by avoiding stressful daily commuting, and enabling them to participate in family life during the entire day through flexible working patterns. Slashing office costs is a major factor for the companies, but also cited is the reduction in the pollution generated by traditional office working. However, the main driver for a shift to remote working may be surprising:

The first reason they are going remote-first is simple — it lets them hire more talented people

Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they can hire the best person in the world for every role

Traditional ways of running a company have made it hard to bring about this change. But there is one sphere whose stunning success is built on this very shift. The world of free software and open source has embraced distributed teams working at home for nearly 30 years. This has allowed projects to select people on the basis of their skills, rather on their availability for a local office. It also means that people can work on what they are best at, and most interested in, rather than on what their local team needs them to do. As a result, open source software has gone from a bit of coding fun in the bedroom of a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, to the dominant form of software in every field, with the lone exception of the desktop. Its success has also inspired a range of related movements, such as open access, open data, open science and many more.

What’s remarkable is that Linus did not set out to create this new kind of global, distributed software development methodology. It simply evolved from the time he placed his first, rough version of the Linux kernel on an FTP server in Finland, and invited people to download it freely. The crucial step was his willingness to accept suggestions to improve the code from anyone, provided they were good ones. That encouraged people to join the project, because they knew that there was no traditional business hierarchy based on seniority, just a meritocracy, where their suggestions would be accepted if their work was demonstrably better than the existing code. The companies that will thrive most from today’s epochal shift to working from home will be those that are willing to implement similar ideas to those of Linus from 30 years ago, transposed to a general business context.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: distributed, linus torvalds, open source, pandemic, work from home

Security And Privacy In A Brave New Work From Home World

from the security-from-home dept

We have moved to a radically remote posture, leaving a lot of empty real-estate in corporate offices and abandoning the final protections of the digital perimeter. For years, we?ve heard thatthe perimeter is dead and there are no borders in cyberspace. We have even had promises of a new and better style of working without being bound to a physical office and the tyranny and waste of the commute. However, much like the promise of less travel in a digital age or even the total paperless office these work-life aspirations never had a chance to materialize before COVID-19 forced us to disperse and connect over the Internet. This has massive implications on corporate culture and productivity. More immediately, the surge in use of remote work capabilities has consequences from a security and privacy perspective that cannot be ignored.

For some, working from home isn?t new. This is especially true for those in sales and field marketing across many industries or for knowledge workers, such as federal government employees that are familiar with their telecommuting contract. The day after the ?stay home? order is given, the rest of the company suddenly find themselves doing the math on how to stay productive, whether they are the 20% of largely general and administrative or management staff who are always in the office for a young tech startup or the 80% of all employees at a big blue chip company. Some already have a laptop that they bring with them everywhere and are used to bringing home, but for others it?s time to spark up the family computer or get a hastily issued company laptop and try to get it running without an IT technician parked at their elbow to help. Others will grab a tablet or a smartphone, once relegated to mostly personal use, and repurpose it to attend to professional needs. Any way you look at it, the enterprise footprint just grew and radically changed in a 24 hour period.

From a security perspective, the basics are critical. This is true whether a company is a mature security shop or not?risk management is the lodestar. It starts with a risk analysis and dialog. You?ll need to first create a master list of security essentials and rank them in order of sensitivity, likelihood and impact. The reality is that you can do anything, but you can?t do everything; and ultimately this is a triage game.

High on the list are concerns about misinformation, weaponized information and social engineering. While companies can?t control machines that they don?t own, they have to try to get the most secure endpoints they can and ensure identity integrity. This means emphasizing what channels are appropriate or not for employees and their families for information: news networks, websites and the like. But COVID-19 is our new common watering hole, and malicious actors are manufacturing phishing attacks, devilish spear-phishing campaigns, rogue applications and more. Regular, short, routine communications to remind people of the basics, to gain a pulse on the organization and to provide clear policies are essential.

Also at the highest level of concern is securing the connection to the network and back into the environment. This requires VPN connections, strong authentication and endpoint prevention and detection controls. In the back office generally and in the security operations center specifically, baselines from which anomalies are normally noted for focus will be in flux; everything will look like an anomaly for a while in the brave new remote world.

Which brings us to the most difficult of topics: privacy.

Did employees bring notes and data home before the office closure? Are they creating IP and data protected by privacy laws and regulations as they continue to do business? Who is in the immediate environment physically? These are some of the critical questions. In some cases you may never know the answers to these questions or you may not have a right to know the answers but must appreciate others? living situations and assume some worst case scenarios.

There are still more questions. Should cameras be on for conference calls when employees might be embarrassed of their personal space being seen by colleagues? Should they use headsets when a life partner might work for another company or even a competitor or perhaps a roommate might simply overhear sensitive information? Do we encourage them to care for a child when they are crying or do workers feel the need to hide their families? While many companies have previously developed ?work from home? policies now we are beginning to understand what is really needed for remote, working employees. Now is the time to take a fresh look at privacy in your work from home policy.

Finally, we must understand the adversary is moving into a new normal as well. They may not be able to immediately exploit all weaknesses or even any given weakness. They too will pursue the lowest hanging fruit while investing in some longer term R&D to develop new attacks specifically for the home environment. Threat actors may be purchasing tools from cybercriminals, mining existing botnets to see what IP is on those already-compromised machines or targeting home automation, printers and routers after triangulating IP addresses and digital locations for targets. In the weeks ahead, targeting new dimensions of technical diversity and innovating to develop new attack vectors will be the name of the game for the bad guys.

The future is very much a moving target for security and privacy professionals. Here is where the ongoing maintenance on an ongoing basis is critical: watching vulnerabilities in the new battery of enterprise applications for remote productivity, moving to the next order of vulnerabilities and so on. This might involve extending IT support and patching advice to home users on how to secure their home network, how to configure Amazon or Alexa devices or new tools and services for secure note-taking, collaboration, use of newly available standard operating environment systems and so on. In short, the game of security and privacy will be about rates of adaptation between asymmetric opponents.

The brave new work from home world would be best if it was short lived, but the genie won?t go back in the bottle. While the economy will adapt and move on at some point, it?s too early to tell what percentage of current remote workers will continue to work from home permanently in a post COVID-19 world or if we will return to the tyranny of the commute. Regardless, the lasting effect of innovation on both attack and defense will persist. As has been said, never waste a good crisis: let?s hope that IT, corporate culture, security and privacy all benefit from the current situation to make a more productive and humane cyber world when we return to a more normal epidemiological world.

Sam Curry is Chief Product and Security Officer at Cybereason. Ari Schwartz was Special Assistant to President Obama for Cybersecurity and Is Managing Director for Cybersecurity Services at Venable.

Filed Under: cybersecurity, privacy, security, work from home

Charter Spectrum Under Fire For Putting The Public At Risk During Coronavirus

from the monopolizing-stupidity dept

Fri, Mar 20th 2020 05:23am - Karl Bode

Charter Communications literally has some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any company in any industry in America. Like Comcast, Charter has spent years merging its way to market domination, and now enjoys a notable monopoly over broadband in numerous U.S. markets. This monopoly, combined with regulatory capture, has resulted in a company that literally doesn’t have to give a damn about its customers.

As it turns out, the company doesn’t treat its employees much better.

For the last few days, both Gizmodo and TechCrunch have been fielding complaints from a torrent of Spectrum employees who say the company is putting them at unnecessary risk. Employees who say there’s no technical reason they can’t perform their work remotely have been mandated to continue coming into the office, despite CDC warnings that social distancing will be essential to slow the spread of the pandemic across the United States. Several employees sent internal memos warning all employees the company was ignoring CDC recommendations:

“The CDC guidelines are clear. The CDPHE guidelines are clear. The WHO guidelines are clear. The science of social distancing is real. We have the complete ability to do our jobs entirely from home,? he wrote, reeling off the advice from several state and federal government departments and international health organizations. ?Coming into the office now is pointlessly reckless. It?s also socially irresponsible. Charter, like the rest of us, should do what is necessary to help reduce the spread of coronavirus. Social distancing has a real slowing effect on the virus ? that means lives can be saved.”

But employees who are raising alarm bells that Charter is putting lives at risk are being told to take sick leave or quit:

“Wheeler said he was given an ultimatum. Either he could work from the office or take sick leave. Staff are not allowed to work from home, he was told. Wheeler offered his resignation, but was sent home instead and asked to think about his decision until Monday.

Later in the day, he received a call from work. Charter accepted his resignation, effective immediately.”

In some instances, staff are being told to report to work despite positive COVID-19 tests being found at Charter offices. At the heart of the problem is Charter CEO (and formerly Comcast executive) Tom Rutledge, who, much like his belief that streaming password sharing is the biggest problem facing the industry at the moment, doesn’t think much of this whole modern telework thing:

“The employees we spoke to said that while Charter has the means to allow staff to work from home, executives are reluctant to relax the policy. Charter chief executive Tom Rutledge said in an internal email to staff this week that employees are ?more effective from the office.”

The same monopoly mindset — in which the reality on the ground doesn’t, can’t, and won’t matter because there’s no organic or regulatory penalty for bad behavior — is certainly evident in the way Charter treats its employees. Though it’s not just monopoly power, given that Comcast is not only letting its employees work from home but is doling out hazard pay. Which means at the end of the day it comes down to terrible management, and an unwillingness to listen to your own employees, and a top down failure in leadership that’s literally now putting human lives at risk. Not just those of Charter employees, but, given the symptomless transmission evident in COVID-19, everybody in the regions that Charter does business.

Update: It sounds like Charter may finally be getting the message.

Filed Under: coronavirus, covid-19, efficiency, health and safety, remote work, tom rutledge, work from home
Companies: charter communications

eBay Banishes Demons, Djinns, Work-From-Home Schemes And Other Hellspawn

from the empower-your-earning-ability-with-this-One-Simple-Spell! dept

eBay's Fall Seller Update has just arrived, bringing with it several tables, FAQs, a bullet-pointed “Best Practices,” and sadly, to the purveyors of certain goods, a list of categories that will no longer be welcome within the confines of Paypal Fraud Central eBay's listings.

Several “metaphysical” categories are being dropped as of August 30th, and sellers will have to remove listings for “spells, curses, hexing, conjuring, magic, prayers, blessing services, magic potions, [and] healing sessions.” Sadly, eBay says that “transactions in these categories often result in issues between the buyer and seller that are difficult to resolve,” resulting in the discontinuation.

The full list of dropped categories also includes the following items:

work from home businesses & information; wholesale lists, and drop shop lists

It's not often that someone (inadvertently) makes the clear statement that, yes, work-at-home “information” is about as useful as a Haunted Magical Male Dog Familiar.

I have no doubt that any issues arising between the sellers of these “goods” and the purchasers would be “difficult to resolve.” I can only imagine the response team asking questions such as “Did you feel you weren't getting scammed quickly enough?” or “Do you feel that the three day period was inadequate to test proper bonding with the dog spirit contained in the aquarium decor rock you picked up at a highly inflated price?” This means that these sellers will most likely have to relocate to the welcoming confines of Human Trafficking, LLC Craigslist, where buyers and sellers will be able to better match up vendors with victims, thanks to region-specific listings.

Or, you know, just stay there.

While this news is likely disheartening to your average small businesswiccan and clickfraudster, it's probably for the best. The mantra around various suburbs, rural co-ops and unincorporated townships has always been “Put your money back into the community. Think Globally. Shop locally!” With these “alternative” businesses being shunted back to Craigslist (it's almost as if they never left!), citizens will be able to turn to their friends and neighbors for their next Incubus Succubus DJINN Summoning Spell or Doctor Job, Employment Website Sale. And that's the way things should be. Local merchants preying on local victims, all the while “thinking globally” about which offshore location would make a decent retirement spot.

Of course, as with any shakeup, there's bound to be a few victims. Due to eBay's culling of the categories, we may never know if this Haunted Doll Has Spirit Of An 18 YR Old Jogger Found Strangled To Death will ever find a happy home in which to “scream out loud and break things out of anger.” But, if you act quickly, you could be the lucky person to give this possessed and needy doll “alot of attention,” in order to prevent her from “screaming at night banging on the walls and knocking things over.”

Perhaps picking up a cushy Doctor Job would give you the additional at-home time needed to give this doll your undivided attention, as well as allow you to get used to its “tendency to stare at people where it gets to the point of being very uncomfortable.” Perhaps Haunted Doll could pitch in and babysit, giving you a much-needed night away from all the screaming, breaking and staring. After all, she is “good with kids and pets.”

Filed Under: auction, magic, potions, spells, work from home
Companies: ebay