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Dell Mandates Five-Day Office Presence For Global Sales Team 47

Posted by msmash from the party-time's-over dept.
Dell is requiring global sales employees to work from offices five days a week starting September 30, according to an internal memo. The move aims to foster collaboration and skill development. Field representatives must spend five days weekly with customers, partners, or in-office, up from the previous three-day requirement, Dell says in the memo, according to Reuters. Remote workers unable to access Dell offices will continue working from home.
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Dell Mandates Five-Day Office Presence For Global Sales Team More

Dell Mandates Five-Day Office Presence For Global Sales Team

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  • Sales people not like other employees (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Friday September 27, 2024 @10:43AM (#64821557)

    They come, they go, they hop from company to company, they produce and hit goals or get fired.

    The can-do aggressive go-go-go kill-kill-kill types won't care about this because they'll be out with customers or potential customers or doing something else to bring in money every day. The ones who aren't energetic would eventually be fired anyway for missing targets.

    If your sales people are in the office 5 days a week you need new sales people.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HBI ( 10338492 )

      And an entirely correct post gets modded down instantaneously.

    • They've got some people hitting goals but just barely and they want to cycle them out w/o paying unemployment.

      One of the most ****ed up things we do is make unemployment an "insurance" instead of paying it out of the general budget.

      That incentivizes companies to come up with ways to fire us for cause so their premiums don't go up.

      We're not supposed to think about that. We're supposed to be distracted by DEI or Drag Queens or SJW or violent video games or Satanic Panic or Dungeons & Dragons o

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HBI ( 10338492 )

        It's just part of the 'circuses' part of the standard formulation. The general public is easily led.

    • They will be the reason the rest of your employees will insist on being remote. People can't work when sales stops by to just ask a few questions.. the same ones they asked last week but somehow forgot now that they have a huge new client that just needs a couple questions answered.

    • Oddly I thought sales were conducted remotely these days just like everything else has adapted. A travelling salesman spends much time, well, travelling. Those hours spent in a car/train are more wisely spend creating leads.

      Working from the office was one thing I thought might apply more to sales than other teams, but this could be a sign of how disconnected I am from that side of things.

      One thing is for sure though, a sweeping statement from any of these corporates is a stupid thing to make, regardless of

      • A bad rep that shows up beats a great rep that's remote. More face to face time leads to higher win rates. And f2f is real time interaction not virtual. My product is a nit for my company so even if we're on track for sales if the larger company isn't we'll get put on travel and expense restrictions. It is clear as day that after about 30 days of restrictions our close rates start dropping, then 30 days after they're lifted they pick back up. We have the data, it's clear as day. More f2f equals more wins, h

        • Again, this all depends, I don't think a sales person would be as successful if they spent *all* their time on the road, there has to be some element of building leads that starts in an office, otherwise they'll be roaming aimlessly. That works too as a door-to-door salesman, but their signal/noise ratio could be better.

          Some time (not all) in the office makes sense for sales people, all the time? Probably not, but there should be some balance, or some of the team are looking for leads whilst others are clos

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Salespeople generally have been the ones that work remotely, and this has been true for before we had technology to do so.

        You see, getting sales is about getting in front of customers and offering a level of service the other guy won't,

        In the 19th century, they went door to door with samples of their wares. For companies, they went from company to company offering their products. They often had to phone sales in - company X ordered 100 typewriters, ship them out immediately.

        Do you really want to get an emai

        • I'm glad I don't have to get involved in any of this!

        • In the 19th century, they went door to door with samples of their wares.

          And not just then. I can remember having the Fuller Brush Man come round, going door to door to sell brushes in the mid-50s and into the 60s. Not only did he sell replacements for worn-out brushes, he had new styles of brush to get into places that older brushes didn't fit. And, during part of that time, my father was picking up extra income in the evenings by selling encyclopedias door to door. Not an easy sell, but worth the ef
    • I think there's a touch of nuance to it, but yes this. The nuance being some of your sales engineers and other sales augmentation roles aren't in the same grind as they have a lot more thought work to do, and being in an office would be a benefit, but where do you want your SEs, SAs, and other rolls centrally located so every customer visit is a journey or near the customer so they can get the FaceTime more readily. If it's an inside sales org heck yea they should be in the office, those orgs thrive off the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by trawg ( 308495 )

      Isn't that exactly why this is a dumb rule? Who cares where sales people are as long as they're selling? They have the absolute easiest way to measure performance of any role.

      We have a small sales team (5 people) and they are mostly fully remote for precisely this reason. They work their own hours and manage their own time. They have their sales targets and they know they need to maintain them to keep their jobs. Any other micromanagement seems totally superfluous to me, though I'll say I'm not from a sales

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      Sales people have no reason to ever be in the office except when they meet with a client.
      Customer service, and Tech support have no reason ever be in the office, ever.

      A company is literately wasting money on empty office space, and often the "office" is absolutely nasty to work in. Three examples:
      - Call center, customer support - didn't have the decency to even have enough seats for everyone, people had to share headsets, and people got sick all the time, you can hear other workers in the background becaus

  • This is just the "fake-because" version of layoffs.

    Get people to quit instead of issuing pink-slips.

    Some State Labor Relations Boards love to sink their teeth into this stuff.

    Dell probably calculates that the fines are cheaper.

    • Re:Three Days Notice? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Friday September 27, 2024 @10:56AM (#64821597)

      This is just the "fake-because" version of layoffs.

      Get people to quit instead of issuing pink-slips.

      Some State Labor Relations Boards love to sink their teeth into this stuff.

      Dell probably calculates that the fines are cheaper.

      Sure, maybe. According to the Slashdot mob, the elite will leave for jobs that require no presence, the dregs will come to the office, and Dell will be out of business, because they only have incompetents working.

      I'm pretty certain that sales employees don't fit the introvert developer stereotype. I'm also pretty certain that sales often requires meeting with clients, another thing that might be anathema to the slashdot mob. Indeed, it would be interesting to see the productivity differences between the salesman who will only WFH and those who will meet personally with clients or prospective clients.

      The world is not made up of only developers and programmers. Some of us need to deal directly with people in person, not exclusively via Zoom. Sales forces are one of those.

    • Some State Labor Relations Boards love to sink their teeth into this stuff.

      I assure you, here in Texas, they don't. And Dell used to "own" a lot of the legal firms in Austin surrounding burbs to discourage any of them from wanting to litigate, making it hard to find a lawyer who could take you on as a client.

      This is actually one of the best reasons never to RTO: you can live in places your employer doesn't have a strong financial stake in.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      Dell probably calculates that the fines are cheaper.

      And they're probably right.

  • Just do a proper layoff with severance, you can afford it. If Dell is too cheap for it they can just lay people off without severance. Bullying people out of the workplace is pathetic bullshit.

    • Exactly. The sentence "Remote workers unable to access Dell offices will continue working from home." is a clue that RTO isn't actually deemed necessary by Dell for this group.

      • Exactly. The sentence "Remote workers unable to access Dell offices will continue working from home." is a clue that RTO isn't actually deemed necessary by Dell for this group.

        The previous Dell RTO headline was that people were given a one-time choice: return to office 3 days per week or become permanently full time remote with no possibility of internal job transfers or promotions. That was Dell's way of acknowledging that a lot of people had moved or been hired based on a promise they could work remotely but that the deal was now being altered. Everyone had to pray they don't alter it any further.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      I do wish they'd stabilize things. We're on our fourth account rep this month as of yesterday.

    • Dell HW used to be "ok", now it's mostly bendy plastic junk. Not touched anything of Dells in years that I thought was good.

      I don't think they're in a position where they can behave ethically, and I hope others will join me in avoiding the unethical vendors and employers.

      • My current employer decided to, ahem, "upgrade" my laptop (the previous one, a Lenovo Thinkpad, was 4 years old). They went with Dell this time.
        Suffice to say it feels like a downgrade, with cheap plastic, creaky when handled, and it it slower and noisier than the previous laptop. It's also the second laptop I got, because the first one locked up during imaging when I went to get it from the office, so they replaced it immediately.

        Luckily, I don't have to use it that much because I have a client-provided la

  • From what I have experienced with global sales teams in other companies, these employees have odd hours because they have to connect with their coworkers and customers in different time zones. For example, meeting with someone in Europe before 8am and after 5pm their time? Not going to happen. So the meeting has to be early morning. While customers in Asia might be more flexible to meeting outside their 8am-5pm hours, they do not work 24/7 either. Forcing employees to come into work just for meetings when t

    • Sales were never expected to be in the office period. Sales people have to work with customers as a priority to actually sell stuff. No clue why Dell is doing this.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by taustin ( 171655 )

        No clue why Dell is doing this.

        I doubt they know, either.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        They should either be meeting customers in person, or interacting with them. In the latter case it's much easier to have calls from home when you have no distractions, rather than the typical open plan office where you have a cacophony of noise from your colleagues.

        I find calls with a lot of background noise extremely offputting, especially if the background noise leaks information when you listen closely enough. I'm not inclined to buy anything from such companies because if they can leak information about

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HBI ( 10338492 )

      I used to be a home office sales employee of MSFT for about 5 years. One of my tasks was approving labor invoices for my area. These generally came out sometime late in the day Pacific Time, as befits a Redmond-based corp. I'm on the East Coast. I was expected to approve them when they dropped within an hour, even on weekends. When there was a govt shutdown coming, odd hours then, sometimes all night. And yes,as you point out, sometimes we dealt with APAC or EMEA-based accounts.

      You are never off in sale

  • IBM, Amazon, now Dell with many others to follow. This is a very inexpensive way to force attrition via a legal policy employment requirement. Those people that voluntarily leave are not counted in any "layoff" sparing the company (at least temporarily) from announcing layoff reductions. Furthermore, the company does not have do a charge off to compensated people when they leave. In fact they get the best of both works in the reduced headcount without the cost. The other added benefit is that statistic
  • I think this is a cheap trick used to encourage people to leave instead of laying them off.

  • This reads as:

    Dell artificially-selects for obedience-above-reasoning gene.

    Noone left in company able to predict effect of excluding free-will and creativity on company success.

  • So ... (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday September 27, 2024 @04:07PM (#64822505)

    Remote workers unable to access Dell offices will continue working from home.

    ... North Koreans [slashdot.org].

  • Dell's outside sales execs and sales engineers, and probably a good fraction of their inside sales execs and sales engineers, were already WfH... in 2003. RTO is a stupid business theater cargo cult that does nothing but destroy employee-employer goodwill, drive away talent, and makes a corporation look horrible, petty, and obsolete.

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