Dell's Failure to Force Workers Back to the Office

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.

Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell’s plan to restore its in-office culture.

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Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell’s plan to restore its in-office culture.

Which means two things:

  1. Those workers already had no belief they were on any sort of career-building promotional track.

  2. Dell can count on higher employee churn for the foreseeable future because by flagging themselves as “remote”, these workers have already consciously triggered the thought in their own mind that their days at Dell are numbered and they will be more consciously looking for new jobs.

The average employee doesn’t spend all day pondering ways to find some other gig at some other company, possibly in some other city. For most people and personalities, job changes are a LAST resort and many employees actually exert significant mental cycles each day IGNORING signs they should be looking elsewhere.

These employees have already crossed a crucial mental threshold of accepting internally the idea that they will be leaving at some point.

That’s not to say that Dell isn’t doing the right thing and that’s not to say that these employees will find equally good or better gigs elsewhere and leave to take them. They may leave for new pastures and find they hate the role or the environment but they most likely won’t return and Dell mostly likely won’t greet anyone with open arms. The problem for any employer in this situation is that any attempt to return to a prior equilibrium is going to induce tremendous disruptions to team continuity and productivity. To the extent that many of these “think workers” are the company’s DNA / intellectual property, these employers are essentially jettisoning their own memory banks, like Dave unscrewing HAL’s memory modules.

WTH

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