IBM Just Committed Cultural and Creative Suicide
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/ibm-just-committed-cultural-and-creative-suicide.html
10 replies (most recent on top)
Cisco should do the same and watch the deadwood leave.
Not all deadwood works from home. As someone else replied, a lot of deadwood comes into the office for visibility but does nothing.
For IT support staff, WFH is critical. Who want's to drive into the office just to do a five min task that gets escalated to the on-call person? VPN into the network, fix the issue, and go back to sleep, watching TV or whatever you were doing when you got alerted that there was an urgent issue to deal with. Need to move a large amount of data, but need to monitor it's progress over several hours? I'd rather do that from home than have to sit in the office twiddling my thumbs waiting.
I knew I'd blown a job interview immediately after being LR'd back in Aug by asking about their remote access policies. They wanted me to attend virtual meetings with staff in Switzerland at 7AM every morning. I asked if I was going to be late, due to an accident causing traffic delays, if I could attend the meeting remotely and was told no. They said that working from home did not promote good work/life balance and I said "How is forcing me to come into the office for after hours maintenance, or causing me to take extra time off because I have a cold and don't want to spread my germs, or worse, caught a cold because someone failed to stay away from work and shared their germs a good work/life balance?" I wouldn't have accepted the job if they'd offered it with a 25% increase over my Cisco pay.
It's up to managers to ensure that all employees are not deadwood, regardless of whether they work in the office or work from home, or some of both. Any manager who's not doing that, is deadwood themselves.
You want to be part of Meraki. MMMmmm these great snacks, coffee and location. How's the McCarthy Ranch treating you?
Meraki not being fully assimilated into Cisco culture is why they are successful. Otherwise everybody would have quit and the only working Cisco SD solution would be killed.
In my experience, most of the deadwood actually went into work. Loved the visibility to build relationships, while working on absolutely nothing.
@lxk: Because the SF office you are probably talking about was Meraki's and when Meraki signed their deal with Cisco they made it clear they WOULD NEVER BE Cisco. Its in their agreement.
You can live around the corner from that office and if you have a Cisco badge, you aren't getting in. No hipster coolness, free food, etc.
Cisco shuts down buildings on the SJ campus yet maintains a few offices up in SF. Why haven't they forced all the companies in SF to work from the SJ Campus?
No WFH, I Quit!
That's my motto. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it couldn't WFH. Duh!!
Cisco should do the same and watch the deadwood leave.
@wgf - I reckon this is a rhetorical question - so here it goes: Because culture and creativity, when set in an optimal way, yields innovation. Without innovation you will quickly fold, you may have a few good quarters due to that payroll saving due to people leaving but you will not be able to crank out new products, service clients with quality, find and make happy customers, etc.
IBM just found a new method to layoff thousands without paying severance. Why would IBM care about culture or creativity?