Dell Sales team told to return to office 5 days a week

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
- 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
- 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?
- The world is not flat, stop spreading misinformation.

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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
They already laid off a bunch.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dell-cuts-workers-sales-team-170000115.html
I guess not enough.

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.
- Why should they care though? It's not like commercial real estate sells more computers. Staff still needs desktops, infrastructure still needs datacenters.
- Why would Dell care about the commercial office real estate market?
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.
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.
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.

Unironically how I live my life

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!
- You want xenon lights, thats the heavy duty standard.
- On a serious note, why?

Because making calls and using a computer requires a specific lacale...

lmaoooo Murica is just 10 companies in a trenchcoat pretending to be a country

They would ask you to return to the ashes if the office burnt down.

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 just might

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.
- We just test piloted a few for the first time since IBM stopped making them. I was really disappointed when one had a fan problem just outside of warranty, I went ahead and cracked it open. It was all Phillips screws which was kind of nice. They weren't all the same which kind of sucks but not that bad. I went to pull the fan out to get a replacement, found out I had to replace the entire fan assembly heat pipes heat sinks everything. I was super pissed off until I found out I could buy the part off their website and it was 80 bucks. Dell won't even sell me parts. 80 boxes a lot to pay for a fan, But when replacing it replaces both the CPU and the GPU fan and gives me fresh radiators, It could be worse.
  From a corporate standpoint I'm a fan.
- Working at a computer shop, Lenovo ThinkPads are usually pretty fine, but the main fault we've seen with them is lack or completely missing thermal compound. On one occasion I saw my colleague's machine not post, and IIRC we had to reset the CMOS to get it back up.

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 totally get it. Good luck though, make sure you find a landing space first. WFH jobs are decreasing and are getting much more competitive. They're also, unfortunately, prone to be suddenly or slowly shifted to in-office positions. Trying to work a mandatory period of WFH into your contract might be useful, but that'll be pretty difficult.
As long as you are very employable and in the right field you should be fine. Using "transitional WFH" as a way to entice workers is becoming more commonplace and employers are often not transparent about it.
A friend works in HR at a place that hires as "WFH" and doesn't mention at any point that there is already a timeline in place for two days in office after six weeks and then full time in office after three months. It's not stipulated anywhere, it's a "new policy" that comes down... on the same timeline... for every new employee. Lol
How about crustaceans?
well I'm unemployed and fucked

I'm beginning to think companies are doing this to get people to leave by themselves

I'd say it depends on what you want from a job. I've mostly been able to do nothing 90% of the time and still make good money. That 10% earns my share because it's often brutally stressful. But I can hide amongst the bureaucracy.

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.

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.

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.

Sales Team tells Dell to return to Linkedin?

WFH was a £6.6k tax free bonus a year for me.

I hope it never ends

Damn, you know it’s bad when Dell is laying off a ton of people through policy.

Is there a way to rank tech companies on how shitty they are? I'd love some kind of directory of companies and all the cunty things they have done in the last few years - like uncov but for established companies.

And businesses that need salespeople are salivating right now.