HP To Cut Back On Telecommuting 238
Makarand writes "Hewlett-Packard, the company that began
making flexible work arrangements for its employees starting in 1967, is cutting back on telecommuting arrangements
for its IT employees. By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. Those who don't wish to make this change will be out of work without severance pay. While other companies nationwide are pushing more employees to work from home to cut office costs, HP believes bringing its information-technology employees together in the office will make them swifter and smarter and allow them to be more effective."
If memory serves me correctly- (Score:5, Informative)
But it's been a little while since I read the article, and I may have it wrong.
It makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
When we have tried this with other aspects of our business it has had similar results. Most people simply lack the self discipline to make turn the telecommuter opportunity into a reality (for them).
Re:Could they... (Score:4, Informative)
Not a biggie for me, as I read the contract fully and understood the implications. Also the one move so far has been for the better for me. e.g. not to india
Min
Add to this HP's Real Estate consolidation... (Score:2, Informative)
The building management teams are going nuts trying to fit more people in less capacity. They weren't warned about the telecommuting initiative when planning began for the consolidations.
Many staff are having their cube-space halved, some of the hot-desking areas are not much bigger than 1sq metre. Teams that are being told they have to come back in are sometimes getting half the cubes they need for the number in the team, so many have to hot-desk.
Adding to this, HP's closing many smaller outlying sites and those people have to travel to the bigger sites. The buildings will certainly be crammed to the rafters with people.
Re:mad force.... (Score:5, Informative)
When someone uses the "a few bad apples spoil it for the whole bunch" argument, they don't address the probability that productivity increases as a whole, even with those bad apples. In this particular case, a Wallyworld manager goes to HP and begins treating IT professionals just like they treated the illegal immigrants and sub-minimum wage unskilled workers back at Wallyworld.
Telecommuting isn't for everyone, nor for every job, but taking your lead on this issue from a Wally World manager is like asking a NeoCon for advice on social responsibility in government.
Re:How can you measure efficiency? (Score:2, Informative)
And it's for this precise reason that companies in trouble almost always fire all of the engineers and people producing product while ramping up the sales force.
The next step is left as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Yep (Score:4, Informative)
I don't expect anyone to acquire HP. Compaq's acquisition of Digital created an enormous bloat that ultimately sank Compaq. HP's ill-advised decision to acquire Compaq was in the political and financial interests of a handful of executives at both firms, at the enormous expense of employees, stockholders, and customers. More significantly HP inherited the problems of a troubled Compaq in a troubled industry. Since the acquisition, HP's stock as risen as I predicted it would from $11/share to the low 30's. However, most of that rise as been "normal buoancy" of a rising tech market recovering from the 2000-2001 decline and the collective sigh of relief when Fiorina's hand-picked board of directors found balls enough to fire her.
Despite that progress (for which my retirement fund is grateful), HP faces daunting challenges:
1. Their market share in printers was so high that there was nowhere to go but down, as offerings from Epson, Canon, and others brought increasingly credible offerings to market.
2. The printer market itself has been saturated.
3. The PC business is only marginally profitable and unlikely to improve.
4. The large server market is (Unix SuperDome systems) is under pressure from increasingly powerful dual core offerings from Intel and AMS.
5. HP's multibillion dollar gamble on Itanium (remember HP partnered with Intel to co-invent and co-fund Itanium) has largely failed, as AMD forced Intel's had with it's dual mode 32/64-bit Opteron, leaving Itanium to join Betamax in the Hall of Fame for great technologies that the market passed on.
6. HP has huge customer credibility issues across an untenable array of platform and operating system offerings: multiple versions of Unix, Tandem Non-stop, DEC Alpha and it's myriad of also-ran OSes, and MPE, which has survived HP management's best efforts to kill it. It's not that customers don't understand the HP roadmap: it's that HP has earned low credibility.
7. Even if HP returned to its $11 five year low, the market cap is so large that only a stock swap in a highly inflated market would permit HP's acquisition. Even then, who could buy them without getting shot down by FTC or EEC antitrust regulators. IBM's big enough; Dell might be. But either would create untenable monopoly through an acquisition of that size. The only possibility of an acquisition I could forsee is from outside the IT Industry.
8. HP's profits still largely come from ink, toner, and print media -- an annuity revenue stream for HP, but one facing erosion as years of market share losses on print platforms translate into lower growth in ink.
I look for HP to begin selling off assets and lines of business.
On Telecommuting...
The folks HP is reeling back in are application developers, IT support, network management, etc., not the customer facing architects and field force. HP has realized, I suspect, that workspace costing formulas were the problem (for example, a 8x8 cubibcle in Houston "cost" the same as a 8x8 cube in Manhattan -- not exactly market reality). There are substantial costs involved with telecommuting (networking, local equipment that would normally be shared). More importantly, IT operations is a team sport that often requires pulling people into a room and hammering out an answer or an agreement -- much harder to do when employee's are changing diapers while on a con-call.
What's really driving this announcement is that HP is reducing the number of datacenters it operates from and unfathomable 87 to a still barely believable 25. If the telecommuting model were left in place, you'd have support people in one city theorhetically supporting a consolidated data center in another city. That just doesn't make sense.
In the years since Lew Platt left, HP has done some remarkably stupid things. However, this move isn't one of them. It's a necessary move to get both the internal and external cost structure in line with a very competitive IT Services business. The disparity
Creative headcount reduction program (Score:2, Informative)