https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/11/business/return-to-office-2022.html
11 replies (most recent on top)
"Vaccines are not stopping Omicron per Oxford University."
Whoever posted that -- are you vaccinated? If the NY Post had instead said the vaccines are very effective, would you have posted that?
@hmw+1eg4q0T6. OUCH. That hurt
Vaccines are not stopping Omicron per Oxford University.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/13/pfizer-astrazeneca-vaccines-less-effective-at-fighting-omicron-study/
I don’t see how they change course between now and 1/10/22. If they postpone again, they will look like fools. I think they will force people back into the office, and when Omicron surges, pull back again a couple of weeks later.
No, the goal is to thin the older/better paid wells herd.
the young and foreign are cheap.
Yes, exactly correct. Charlie does need to get headcount under 200K for any hope to achieve operational efficiency on par with competitors (but competitors put the technology in place FIRST, in order to make their cuts, and did it over several years.
We are saddled with, at best, 30 year old technology. At a certain point, and that point is now, there is no use in lamenting our previous corrupt management and their focus on lining their own pockets rather than investing in the future. All that has happened and cannot be changed.
The reality is that we don’t have staff with the skill sets to modernize our tech nor do we have the wherewithal to purchase it as we are so inefficient.
This is why our future is to be a “parts bank”, selling off LOBs to Fintechs which have invested and are efficient. This is not Charlie’s fault, but is simply the dysfunctional organization which he joined. It is true that he doesn’t have the management skills to pull it off but it is also true that nobody else was interested in this job.
If that's their plan, it's a stupid plan. For working age people, the disease simply isn't lethal enough to have a meaningful impact on headcount. We could spend 8 hours a day in the office licking door knobs and it still wouldn't change much on that front. Otherwise, I would tend to agree, they don't care.
Attrition. That is all WF is concerned about. It doesn't have to be about people quitting; it can be accomplished from people dying of COVID. They don't care.
WF execs don't give a d*mn about RTO. It's about employee self attrition. Charlie said it himself at shareholder meetings. He needs to get headcount under 200K for any hope to achieve operational efficiency on par with competitors (but competitors put the technology in place FIRST, in order to make their cuts, and did it over several years, unlike WF that lined execs pockets $$$ instead of investing on technology).
Things are about to get much bumpier. WF is going to have to pay severance and unemployment to shake loose those headcount figures. Or start terminating for cause in greater, calculated numbers -- which WF is planning to do. It's already started. Read the new, stricter guidelines in the most recent update of the Employee Handbook.
It is not about RTO. It is about having several people quit.
Charlie still needs to get rid of 20,000k more folks to remain competitive. During 2021, we lost 10k headcount.
Paywall.
The executives had a good feeling about Jan. 10, 2022 — the date when DocuSign’s 7,000 employees worldwide would finally come back to work.
This deadline wouldn’t be like that earlier one in May 2020, which was always a fantasy, or August 2020, which was a bit ambitious, or October 2021, a plan derailed by the Delta variant. Fourth time’s the charm.
“Every time we delay this we’re pushing off the inevitable,” said Joan Burke, the chief people officer, in a late November interview. “At some point in time DocuSign is going to be open.”
That some point in time is no longer in January. The Omicron variant interjected. Just as companies from Ford Motor to Lyft have done in the past week, DocuSign postponed again. In place of a new date came the company’s promise to “reassess our plans as 2022 unfolds.”
“Employees understand the evolving nature of what we’re dealing with makes it impossible to predict,” Ms. Burke said this month. “I can’t even remember all the dates we’ve put out there, and I’m the one who put them out there.”
Return-to-office dates used to be like talismans; the chief executives who set them seemed to wield some power over the shape of the months to come. Then the dates were postponed, and postponed again. At some point the spell was broken. For many companies, office reopening plans have lost their fear factor, coming to seem like wishful thinking rather than a sign of futures filled with alarm clocks, commutes and pants that actually button. The R.T.O. date is gone. It’s been replaced with “we’ll get back to you.”
“The only companies being dishonest are the ones giving employees certainty,” said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who advises dozens of chief executives. “As a parent you can hide stuff from your kids, but as a C.E.O. you can’t do that to adult employees who read the news.”
Some workers have returned to their cubicles in recent months, with office occupancy across the United States rising from 33 percent in August to 40 percent this month, according to data from Kastle Systems, a building security firm. But the visions of full-scale reopenings and mandatory returns, which formed as vaccines rolled out last spring, have remained nebulous.
A late August survey of 238 executives, conducted by Gartner, found that two-thirds of organizations had delayed their return to office plans because of news about coronavirus variants. Apple, Ford, CNN and Google are just a handful of the employers that announced postponements, along with Lyft, which said the earliest that workers would be required to return to the office is 2023.