to be irritated by this work email?

[BoldChild]

Note: This is a large international company, and I am a very tiny fish in a very large pond, but I’ll still paraphrase to avoid any major identifiers

An email went around our (fully remote) company today by new management and went a little something like this:

”Hello, everyone. As this year has been hard on our business, we have decided to implement the following rule: If you are behind in target, you will have to report to your local office and attend the office for a minimum of 4 days. This is so your manager can oversee your daily work and ensure you are doing your job. Your manager will track every phone call and email, and how many clients/customers you reach out to. You will continue to report to the office until your numbers to pick up.

Failure to meet targets will result in an immediate requirement to report to the office. This is non-optional, and everyone must comply. We will not accept any excuses.”

NOW… I am totally on board with the whole “if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, there’s an issue there” but the nature of the email really just irks me.

It reminds me of being back in school, with a teacher threatening to sit beside you to make sure you’ve done your maths instead of talking to your friends. Like if employees do not show up the office, they’ll call our parents.

Am I being unreasonable to feel this is very condescending? And unfair to those who may be struggling due to reasons that aren’t their fault (mental health, illness, personal issues, etc)? These people will be called out in front of their entire team and marched into the offices against their will, and it just seems totally unfair to do to someone instead of handling any issues privately.

I’m honestly considering handing in my notice

If there are particular employees taking the piss they need to be addressed properly. Poor management often address all with 'blanket bollockings' and go with 'oh dont worry it doesnt apply to you' it demotivates the hard workers who go unnoticed, its passive aggressive and creates a toxic workplace culture. Unfortunately becoming far too common. At best its uneducated. At worst its gaslighting ignorance.

Hmm piss poor management and piss poor staff by the sound of it!

What people are going through isn’t necessarily the company’s problem (though there are various employment laws and legislations in place protecting mental health, disability, illness, etc)

But when 98% of the company WFH, and you’re in a vulnerable position being pulled into the office, everyone is going to know why. I’d be mortified, wouldn’t you?

@BoldChild Yep- I think it's a poor way to go about this as an ex HR person .

Instead of re motivating those who aren't doing as well and getting to the bottom of why that might be -- - they will demotivate everyone!

I used to work for many years for a very large FTSE company who allowed WFH before it was a thing. It worked OK for the middle to senior managers. Then everyone applied and COVID hit.

The skiving that went on was shocking. You often didn’t have the same manager for longer than 9 months or so so nothing was done about the women working at home with kids in the background, who were never available for urgent client calls. It was truly shocking. I am not surprised companies have realised what is going on and it really isn’t about sticking a washing load on. A sizeable percentage of people were never to be found during the working day.

Not necessarily. It wouldn’t be fun but hopefully I’d get help so I could do better. Win win for everyone. Some people wfh truly are taking the piss, and it’s fair enough to do something about it.

If your contract is 100% work form home then they can fuck off.

Suggest putting is a bit more diplomatically though.

Are you in sales?
Most of us are below target due to the cost of living etc.
We now have to complete a written chart showing who we have called each day and the outcome of every call and submit it to management at 5pm daily.
It's giving me the rage.
Clearly if a team of 20 are all below target when previously we've all been hitting targets then it's not down to our poor work ethic.

Sorry just seen you mention that your contract gives you the option. What does it say about them being able to demand you attend the office?

Sounds like Ricky Gervias in The Office.

And in addition to our written charts we fill in every day we already work from the office for 40 hours a week with a manager within 10 feet of us. It's upper management wanting to see the written charts. Our direct managers can hear the conversations we have daily!

Nothing. There’s nothing to say they can enforce office days. I think that was an oversight on their part

There are so many ways in which they could have worded that where they didn't come across as absolute wankers.

Even wording it as 'As part of our culture of supporting our associates' wellbeing, we are revising our WFH policy. We are aware of the challenges that working from home can present to staff in terms of social connection and support and therefore have decided that anybody who appears to be in need of individualised support will be provided with this through in person training and advice from their Line Manager. We also provide an Employee Assistance Programme, which can be accessed through (website) with the user name (firm) and the password (firmeap), which provides access to six sessions of counselling and many resources relating to health, financial management and wellbeing.' would make it slightly less 'you're shit, we're hauling you in to be bollocked, micromanaged and ultimately fired'.

There are ways to talk to and motivate staff, and it’s with respect, especially if you demands respect in return.

They’re unbelievably wide of the mark with that email. It’s condescending, threatening and wannabe autocratic.

OP is it possible that the slackers have had multiple conversations about their performance already, and this is the first time a group email has been sent?

It’s not unusual for errors by an individual to be addressed via a group email, not mentioning names, to ensure the same problems don’t continue.

for example, where I work, if employee A made a mistake and booked a client in to the wrong type of appointment, employee A would be quietly spoken to. If employee B did the same thing, then they would be spoken to as well. Then there might be a group email sent out saying “just to remind you all, clients xyz must only be booked into appointments xyz” - something like that. Employees C, D, E, F etc would be thinking “what’s that all about, no need to have a go, we were doing that correctly already”. But they wouldn’t know about employees A and B.

Is it a bank beginning with B?

Micromanaging jobsworths imo

The wording of the email may not have been great but I fully agree with the company and if employees are not hitting their target bring them back into the office. A number of reasons for this they could be not working so why should other team members who are working hard picking up their slack. Also they could be suffering with their mental health but very often people can hide this behind a screen when home working but they have the chance to talk about it in person in the office. If you are hitting your targets working from home you have nothing to be worried about.

I agree that they probably shouldn't have done the blanket email, but they would have had to have the conversation anyway. This way less reason to kick up a fuss as you have been told. Pretty sad that so many appear to be taking the piss! Personally if was one of the people who actually worked at the company I would be pleased. I'm so sick of working hard and seeing others around me slack off. Don't understand why people find this so terrible, do people think businesses are a charity? No wonder the economy is in such a dire state.

It’s clear from this thread that wfh is used and abused by many. It’s a shame cause there are some benefits but don’t get me started on government depts skiving off at home.

Worked for a long time with public sector and even before covid the productivity was shit! You might think you can measure output i.e employee can handle 4 passport applications every 4 hours. The employee blames the process, the technology basically anything to cover up their workload. There was a very big council I worked with who asked us to tell them which was the most popular website for their employees and the answer by a mile was Facebook with many running with it all day..

it is possible to performance manage in most jobs while WFH, without this sort of cr*p

Performance mgt is fine if you have a line manager who stays more than six months and doesn’t move to another team or gets a promotion etc.

The wfh brigade have taken complete advantage (that and covid!)

I mean, maybe if your company employed even rudimentary customer relationship management systems, you might not have to spend time writing reports about who you're contacting!

I've been able to pull records on employee call and email handling since I started my career almost fifteen years ago!

I am fully-remote and my management is very happy with me.

I think a slacker is going to slack, no matter where they are.

I have seen people Internet browsing all day long, vanishing from their desk for hours and being on their mobile phone too many times in offices - I really don't believe being office-based will make lazy people more diligent and hardworking.

Yep, no CRM system here! And now even less calls happening as it takes 5 minutes to fill out the form after every call. I made 5 calls today. So even 2 minutes after each call is 1 hour 40 minutes wasted. Madness.