https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article316910881.html
16 replies (most recent on top)
"So the bank got smarter."
First time I've ever heard someone accuse WF of this.
Good article overall, though it's a joke to not directly link the policies to intentional attrition. It obviously is, Sharts team only has one objective, and that's it.
The torment is the objective.
Of course WF happened to invent the highest level of micro-managing out of the three companies by nailing any employee that isn’t at 8.0 hours to the wall. Brilliant use of time and tech, Chainsaw. FWF and F chainsaw the most
You've assessed enough of them, deeply enough, to assert this?
Either you have, which means that you are also not doing much of anything all day and not worth your compensation.
Or you haven't, which makes you a blatant liar and bootlicker.
Which one is it, chief?
And not a one of them had any leadership chain at all? Just hired in, on no particular team and told "just do whatever you'd like every day"?
Somehow, your worldview seems fulla sh-t.
Oh for sure. We should've just all meekly trundled on in like obedient little peons to serve the "stupid policy".
Brilliance!
All the phenomena described in the article is why most companies led by competent leaders who are downsizing, do it in more focused short-term events - a "year of efficiency" style or structured buyouts. Dragging the process out as long as Wells has led to all these bizarre non-sensical management decisions, that maybe made sense in the moment to move the needle on attrition at the time they were put in place, but when they're retained for the long term management then feels the need to double down on and defend them using increasingly absurd rationale. The whole management system just comes across as a total mess of incoherent decisions. We haven't had WFH company-wide in 4-5 years, and coffee badging hasn't been a thing in a year, and people are still in here re-litigating battles that have already been lost, and accusing a great mass of their coworkers, who are clearly compliant with the monitoring, of being secret time thieves. I honestly DGAF if I get laid off or not I just want the fu--ing company to focus on something else, none of this horsesh-t has anything to do with productivity.
Most office workers are not doing much of anything all day. Not worth the salaries.
I'd be planning to live well beneath my means as companies start mass culling and either not refilling, having AI take over for pennies/day or hiring for <$50k/yr
This is at every company now. Whoever thinks they are safe are not. They can get rid of you for cause months later after the data is compiled.
Look up news articles - some companies have already let go multiple people for time theft, coffee badging, not being at their desks if in office (under table human movement monitors), not being on team calls or using mouse movers or autoclickers.
If you have done any of these things in the last 6 months, you better pray.
@av Wells Fargo was getting by fine without any of these kind of measures before Charlie joined. It wasn't until the endless pressure to reduce headcount started that they decided any of this stuff needed monitoring. I'm going to suggest its more about pushing people out and creating an atmosphere that encourages attrition than it is about finding and identifying non-performers, as I don't believe measuring where a person's a-s is sitting really gives you any indication of their contribution. The lazy fu--s I know were the first ones trying to figure out the minimum compliance rules were for each new measure that got rolled out.
@ap and if you do none of that you get what they were getting which was people MIA for hours (or days, or always) during the work day and tens of thousands of employees they didnt actually need doing literally anything but work all day. The reporting results they were receiving made it clear that a significant portion of the workforce were flat out thieves who shouldn't be employed by anyone anywhere, much less by WF.
The fact its apparently taking years for big banks to even notice a bunch of their employees werent doing anything, including even showing up for work, reflects poorly on all levels of management. Literally every other business in existence mastered the art of making sure its employees were at the designated work location and working when they were supposed to, and didnt leave before they were supposed to decades ago. And that doesnt even address whether they actually do even remotely close to 40 hrs a week of relevant value added work. Good luck gauging that one by measuring keystrokes.
@aa coffee badging and putting in cameos is a rational response to a metrics systems that is measuring something that fundamentally does not matter. Metrics like that incentivizes workers to play games. If you reward badge swipes, you're going to get badge swipes. If you reward staying a certain amount of time, you're going to get people running out the clock. If you reward computer activity, you're going to get a lot of useless non-productive activity to make the reporting look right. Why blame workers instead of the people who designed the absurd system to begin with. An intelligent manage would just take coffee badging as an honest signal from their workers about the value they actually get from working in-office.
Modern companies are tracking:
• badge entries
• computer logins
• Teams status
• VPN connections
• keystrokes
• application activity
• time in meetings
And yet somehow the fundamental question
“Did this person actually do useful work?”
remains beyond the capabilities of the world's most sophisticated corporations with trillions of dollars in assets.
He-l of a technological civilization we've built.
How does an SVP at BofA not understand how badge tracking works? And of course if you're on the road that counts as being in the office. WTF?
The article is telling us what we've known for a while-- it's pointless. What value is there in somebody going to the office, then sitting on teams all day? I don't work with anybody in my city. They're all elsewhere. So I commute to an office, find a sh*tty "cube" (that will apparently just turn into a desk), take 20 minutes to get setup, get on teams.
All the coffee badging and "cameo" id--ts ruined it for everybody. The policy is stupid too for that matter.
Congratulations, corporate America. After decades of developing sophisticated performance analytics, you've finally figured out how to measure whether someone opened a door.