So Dell wants to do a layoff of sales staff, and is going to lose their best performers first.
Dell’s inside sales team probably has a much flatter bell curve, performance wise, then their outside (traveling) reps.
So yes, they are looking to do a layoff without the headlines, or severance, but probably aren’t as concerned where on the bell curve those employees rank.
Middle and lower management of those teams is absolutely sweating bullets about their teams getting wrecked, but big picture, whatever impact the C Suite is expecting, clearly isn’t enough to outweigh whatever net outcome they’re hoping for here.
Edit: also, I pretty much guarantee that any of their far high-end outliers on the inside sales team bell curve, will be given an exemption by whoever is 2 or 3 levels above their direct manager.
They already laid off a bunch.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dell-cuts-workers-sales-team-170000115.html
I guess not enough.
i hate how this “best performers” rhetoric always comes out in WFH discussion. everyone should be able to work from home if it’s better for them regardless of if they’re The Best at their dunder-mifflin ass job
Sure, everyone that has a job that can be done from home should be permitted to do it from home if they want to.
What the best performers rhetoric is about is that these companies are harming their long term prospects by doing things like this, since the personnel that make the most money for the company are generally the ones that can easily leave for another company that will not treat them like a child that needs to be directly monitored.
They are saying the return to office mandate will cause the best performers (who are likely more confident in securing another job) to quit first, not that everyone shouldn’t be WFH.
That’s not the argument. The argument is rather that good employees can easily find new and better jobs. So the remaining people are on average worse.
It’s also called Dead Sea Effect. The good ones evaporate, only salt remains.
Alternative headlines:
- Dell wants to contribute to global warming for no good reason.
- Dell wants to expose workers to death by automobile for no real reason.
Dell looking to cut workforce without layoffs.
We need an alternative headlines community
global warming
When WFH began, I stopped taking the subway into the city every day and instead spent a lot more time driving around the suburbs. My car’s mileage and my ecological footprint went way up. You can’t just make up a statement and have it be true.
I too have an anecdote. If only someone had done research on the topic and we had a way to search for it.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022AV000732
You are so clearly the exception is should not even have to be made clear.
Interesting, for me it was the opposite.
When I had to go back to the office, I started burning cooking oil and truck tires in my backyard every weekend, so my ecological footprint increased significantly
For me, working from home meant eating endangered species for lunch seven days a week instead of just two. Checkmate, liberals.
Lol, “my personal anecdotal story, means someone else is crazy and wrong, despite me having no other evidence either.”
- This person
What are you doing where you have to drive around aimlessly?
Why the fuck would any office worker whose job is 100% on a computer need to be in an office? I don’t understand why companies want to pay for all of that electricity and real estate just to make people sit in cubicles.
To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.
Meh fuck the commercial real estate market. Turn all the buildings into micro apartments or tear them down and install fields of solar panels.
I’ve been screaming its just wage theft. My city provides tax breaks for occupancy (employees prop up the local economy buying lunch). They are making me pay for gas, time, and car maintenance (and lunch but fuck them, I’ll just not eat) for this tax break which goes to C-level bonuses/shareholders. Its just another way of skimming off the top of employee wages.
We worked fully remote for nearly 2 years and the hybrid policy just keeps getting worse and worse. Coupled with quarterly riffs, I also suspect this is to avoid severance pay/unemployment while accelerating the down sizing. Yet our CEO bonus keeps going up and up despite our stock plummeting since the end of COVID lock downs.
Missing the point. The office executives are in bed with the real estate execs.
They are the real estate owners themselves
Sometimes, sure. Somewhat different disciplines but, some folks high up enough certainly play both investments.
Tear them down and build houses. Flood the market of every major city with houses so it becomes unprofitable to buy thousands of houses just to rent.
Then home sales go up, and millenials can ACTUALLY buy houses in their lifetime!
That would piss off the voting base that actually votes though
Why should they care though? It’s not like commercial real estate sells more computers. Staff still needs desktops, infrastructure still needs datacenters.
Because all these companies have a shit load of money in the market including real state…
So sell it
That’s the crux of the issue.
Who’s going to buy it for a high price, if there is no demand for office space, because workers are all remote?
So burn it!
Property damage is an extremely effective way to fight against money. We should be doing it a lot more.
This is what is so fascinating to me about most people, they don’t understand that companies hord their assets in my different kinds of investments when they are this large. Having real estate gives them an asset they can can store large sums of money in that generally appreciate in value over time. If a company is under finacial duress, they can fire a bunch of employees, then sale the land where those employees worked and and save themselves from much larger losses on revenue for a given time period.
Both major companies I’ve worked for sold their commercial real estate and leased it back as one of their very first measures when cost cuts were needed. What we have here is essentially the reverse where tech companies scare off their workforce and industry knowledge and drive up employee costs so they can impart some secondary effect on the commercial real estate market… so yes i remain confused about the priorities in play here.
Why would Dell care about the commercial office real estate market?
they bought instead of rented? iunno
You do understand that large corporations invest in many kinds of assets in order to diversify them right? Real estate is one of the oldest investments any entity can make, and is often considered a pretty strong investment. Everyone needs land right?
So for the past 4 years it didn’t matter, but now it suddenly does? I smell bs on that real estate reason
During the pandemic they had to choose between go remote or close up shop. They didn’t have much choice.
Seems that once Covid stabilized they’ve been trying to force everyone back.
That’s because you don’t know about how CRE funding works.
Large chunk of CRE runs on short term fixed rate debt, which requires refis. Next big cycle is starting about now and will go through 2026.
So feds lowered interest rate sum, and corpos are pushing us into the office to soften the blow from CRE operators and their creditors.
With that being said, low quality class C office space is in default, no way around it.
Shiti suburban trash offices also will die along with the shiti malls.
However, the return to office policy is specifically to bail out class A and B office towers in the major cities, ie the VIP CRE owned by the real owners and not bagholders
Who do you think owns the real estate?
Sociopathy, mostly.
So managers and other poor personality types have someone to torment. This is said flippantly but I’m quite serious.
probably because their cost is sunk in the real estate already and no one wants to buy it.
I’ll go out on a little limb, it might be sales specific. My company is 100% work from home. All the engineers and product and design work remote, maybe come into the office once a week just because.
The sales team however is strongly encouraged to come in as much as possible. I think it’s a morale thing. Sales teams become these weird cults, maybe necessarily. It’s really hard to pick up the phone and make a call when you’ve been rejected 5 times in a row. The teams little ceremonies are designed to help push through that.
Their sales team aregoing about this all wrong. Just buy the consumer lists from major dispenseries, and then call the stoners.
“Dude! You’re buying a dell!” Whats your credit card info?"
“Dude! No way! I was just looking for a way to masturbate!”
“Yeah man! That’s what this is.”
Boom. Easy sale.
You need to set your sights on enterprise sales.
Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.
Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.
I just have slack running on my phone. If I’m at IKEA instead of my computer and someone wants something, I’ll just tell them I’ll take a look at it after lunch. If I’m out biking in the afternoon, I just tell them I’ll take a look at it tomorrow morning.
If someone wants something really urgently, I’ll tell them to give me thirty minutes. Thirty minutes later I’ll tell them that the results are inconclusive and this will need more time, for which I have scheduled a block for tomorrow.
A response (or status!) on slack that’s like “I’m at the grocery, back in 20” is fine with me. It’s more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.
“I’m at the grocery, back in 20”
The policy around remote workers in my unionized heavy-privacy job is that when you’re away from the desk it’s fine; no one wanted to know your bathroom schedule when you were in the office, and no one wants to know now. Grabbing lunch, getting coffee, anything that can occur at the office without leaving, no one cares.
For fire safety and especially for the “bad things happen while you’re by yourself” policy that started after someone fainted in a small windowless basement office long ago, when you’re actually stepping out you must announce the punch-out and punch-in after. It’s a pain, because they do watch and bitch, but meh:
Meghan: grabbing lunch. back in 10 Dave: yeah, me too Meghan: back Roger: Off to the doc Millie: where's Dave? Robert: do we gotta start the Wellness Check? Allison: nah, but I'll call him in a sec. Policy. Dave: wait. I'm back. Don't call the cops. Allison: Dude. Dave: Sorry. I'll pay the doughnut penalty Allison: ha! Okay, going for a walk while the sun's out Millie: Enjoy! Millie: Grabbing the mail. 5 min Millie: back Allison: back. Beautiful out there. Roger: backEtc. our ‘social’ channel is a lot of that shit. And yeah, the policy says an escalating wellness check after a reasonable time.
Keep in mind, this is a Union job. It’s an IT job but the subject matter is heavy-privacy and heavy-policy. Think like a gov HMO or similar deal where we have a lot of accountability and massive protocols. The day before covid they were a “fuck no you’ll never work from home, come in if you have a patch run at 0500 Saturday, hippie” kind of place where they derived value from seeing your ass in a chair. On covid day one it was “run for the hills, go now, take what you can justify needing (keyboards, laptops, screens) and don’t come back onsite unless you have paperwork. Just fuck off, right now”, a complete about-face that’s now enshrined in the contract.
In short, we did it; and if that group of dysfunctional stuffyshirt managers can cope with remote workers - some couldn’t, and like a reverse Dead Sea Effect, the worst of the bunch bailed and the good managers stayed - then I hold out hope that a lot of our sector of desk-and-screen workers can migrate en-masse home and stay there. They came a long way from where they were, and they hammered out a union-compatible workflow for remote work that actually makes sense. Maybe it’s a unicorn, and I hope it’s got legs, as we’re generally happier. And while union shit always has lower pay for the same work - sorry but true - the perks of choosing your environment makes it better.
I will now accept questions.
Especially in sales and finance: every call is potentially on the record, and that’s a problem.
A lot of internal communication in these departments is, to put it mildly, legally not without interest. A quick chat after a meeting is completely off the record, an email is not.
Quick answer to that…you forget everything said off the record.
Quite right too. The most important factor for me when buying a computer is that the sales droid is in an office. All those CPU, RAM and disk numbers are secondary to that.
I just buy whichever one is called “gamer computer” and has the prettiest LED lights on the case. Thats how you know it’s the good shit!
Now they can play golf together instead of by themselves.
Unless it’s the initial outreach team or on-premises staff, sales would be one of the few roles totally suited to remote working.
Some of the more creative or collaborative roles I can see the argument for hybrid working - even if it’s just one day a week or month in the office - but sales, customer service, or first line support seems to be the last area you’d impose a return to work mandate on.
That said, I haven’t got extortionate office rents to justify 😂
I quit answering my dell sales buy. His quotes have been above what I can get buying right off the website. Their premier login must tack on a 25% charge.
Lenovo produces what dell wishes it could.
They would ask you to return to the ashes if the office burnt down.
It just might
I used to work for a major business outsourcer. One of their contingency plans in case an office burned down or had to be evacuated was literally to make everybody work in another office 50 miles away.
It was so bad that they weren’t even willing to reimburse travel costs. It was either get there or be fired.
And in an unlikely turn of fate, the backup office burned down too.
It’s creeping back in the UK here too. I think hybrid works best for me, can collaborate 2 or 3 times a week and stay at home and be more productive to actually DO the work.
And businesses that need salespeople are salivating right now.
I’ll be looking for work in about 3 months and my hard line is wfh.
I will never work in an office with people again.
Because making calls and using a computer requires a specific lacale…
More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”
I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.
Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.
When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.
Time to fire half the workforce.
Before you do that… I have a better idea
This is how they cull us now. Make us quit.
That’s how you get rid of the good people who can easily get a job somewhere else.
