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I’m on hybrid, but my entire team is all over the world, so I’m just as alone in the office as at home. The only difference is that in the office I’m bound by the train schedule, so I can’t take out of hours calls. My coworkers and manager keep petitioning HR to let me work from home full time.
But management can claim a win by forcing ONE IT person to go to the office.
How do they keep track of you if you’re alone in the office? I’m just curious.
We have access cards to unlock the office doors; this is tracked. Everyone is required to be in the office for a certain amount of days per month, and a monthly report is always generated. I found when the fewest people are coming (nobody on my floor), and that’s when I come in, given that my entire team are digital nomads, so I’d communicate with them via Slack anyway.
Gotta love jobs that treat their staff like children.
Damn that sucks. It’s so arbitrary.
Our boss was freaking out over people sometimes doing some private calls during work hours and at a certain point absolutely forbade it. So yeah, people would just end the call at 17:00 sharp and switch off the work phone. It took one week before that rule was rescinded.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
God, I hate how often my CEO says this
Sounds like he’s a fan of unions. Take him up on it.
And that’s ridiculous on general because you know who also does regular work hours? Everyone else!
That means if you need a call with your doctor, bank, whatever, it’s likely gonna be during the workday
This reminds me of a work-to-rule or a “White Strike.” It turns out that every company, even those that supposedly operate off of “unskilled” labor, utterly rely on employees making a ton of judgment calls and often working outside their job description. When employees start working to the letter of their job description, the whole operation quickly grinds to a halt.
Here we call it “standard operation” and it’s also a kind of “white strike”
Same in Brazil. It’s a most effective form of strike - you still get paid, the consultant still hemorrhages money. Another common one among public transit is when bus drivers still go around their route but don’t collect payment.
“Other duties as assigned” is a bitch.
This is when “could you please send that request on writing via e-mail” becomes really useful.
That’s what gets struck in a white strike.
If it’s literally in your job description, as it has been in my last several positions, does it qualify?
Sure. It means they can ask you to do other things that aren’t explicitly written in the original job description. But every time they tell you to do something beyond it, you just start doing THAT exactly to the letter of the request.
Okay, you’ve assigned me a duty. Give me exact, and I mean exact, instructions about how to complete it.
Now repeat for the thousands of tiny tasks everyone just does on their own.
If everyone does it then it works.
You make them assign the task to you, don’t just do it because it’s necessary. Each task that is not part of your actual assigned job needs to be assigned to you. Every time. If they want you to do it every time it’s needed, ask for them to update your job description to reflect it.
It’s called a white strike because you are burying them in paperwork, but not walking off the job.
My listed job duties are infinitely vague and I’m responsible for everything.
Bonus, you can ask for clarification on everything.
A white strike, like all strikes works because of collective action, not because of some tricky technically lol.
Big “thathappened” energy
It’s hilarious the reaction you’re getting. I love this story and someone out there has surely done similar but this is a fiction. I think you’re being downvoted because people really really want it to be true.
Do you have proof that this is fiction? I don’t think so. There’s no proof that it isn’t either, sure, but this sub is mainly just for laughs and the story doesn’t require being true for it to be funny.
Coming into threads and posting stuff like that is like going into malls at Christmas just to tell kids that santa isn’t real. (Or worse, since you don’t even know if you’re right in this case).
Noticeable that you seemed to have taken that comment personally, which is odd–not the intention. In any case, it sounds like a repeat of AITH on Reddit where people would post a lot of fiction and pass it off as real.
Like when your mother and I conceived you.
No one believed I was your father.
…because I wasn’t.
Doing home health was kinda instructive for me in this regard.
The only time you go to the office is to turn stuff in, do inservices/continuing education, or similar. But originally I would answer calls at weird hours because a patient would need coverage, otherwise they wouldn’t be calling.
And then the management spent way too much money buying into some Disney corporate policy thing (literally, they paid money to Disney for the program) that changed a ton of rules in bullshit ways that made no sense for home health.
So, the next time they called, I didn’t answer. Or the time after that, or the time after that. And, when you’re one of three men working for a company that’s partially reliant physical strength to be able to do the work needed for some patients, this alarmed my supervisor. She requested a meeting, and I went in. Mandatory meetings were paid though!
At the meeting, it was expressed that answering calls was part of my job. So I asked id I was being paid to sit at home and wait for calls. No, I wasn’t “on call”. So, you want me on call? No, just to answer when we call you. That’s being on call, and we’re supposed to get paid for that. No, this is different, we just want you to be available when someone calls out for a difficult patient. Soooo, you want me on call.
This went in circles for a while before I switched gears and directly said that answering calls when not on duty was not in place when I was hired, and that the employee handbook specified that being on call was considered a shift, and would be paid as such, and that maybe I should have been on call any of the dozens of times I did wake my ass up from sleep after workout two or three jobs in the first place, and that I never got paid a dime for doing so, so that was the end of it for me.
The response was that they couldn’t stay operating if they paid everyone for being on call instead of us “supporting the company”. My response was that maybe they could have if they hadn’t shelled out for the Disney crap, or if the previous administrator hadn’t been screwing around and embezzling, and that maybe it was time the company supported us.
Not surprisingly, I was one of several employees “let go to streamline services” a few weeks later, right before the company folded entirely.
So, you don’t even have to have an office job to get treated like shit! Isn’t that a relief? Isn’t it?
The response was that they couldn’t stay operating if they paid everyone for being on call instead of us “supporting the company”.
That’s the heart of the matter. They wanted you to support the company, without the company supporting you.
The people who should me steering the ship often would never accept a position at the helm, and then we are left with people serving up platitudes about why they deserve free labour.
Only thing you left out is when they say, “it doesnt come with additional pay but it will look good on your resume!”.
Should be the standard anyway. Reading email and texts from work, or responding to calls, is work. Unless your contact specifies on-call hours, you should ignore your boss outside of working hours. If they really want you to respond they can pay you overtime.
Places that specify on call time also tell you not to check stuff when you’re not at work or supposed to be on call though, because that’s expensive for them. And if they tell you to check something they just put you into on call pay.
Boss calls me (the sole on-site IT person) on a sickday and tells me something important broke and I need to come and fix it (45 minute bus ride one-way). I know exactly what broke and I tell her if she goes into my office and turn my computer on then I can remote in and fix it in literally 5 seconds. She nearly screams at me saying that my contract doesn’t allow remote work and I don’t remember what exactly was said after this point but it was something along the lines of:
“It won’t be fixed for another 5 days then because I’m not coming in today (Thursday, and I don’t work Fridays or Mondays).”
“Ok bye”
“bye”
Guess it wasn’t important
You can always spot the ones who care about the power structures more than the purpose by stupid shit like this.
It was quite generous of you to even suggest solving it on a sickday. Boss should have understood.
The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.
I’m learning that the hard way. Started working for this company 2 hours from home,because I could WFH 3 days a week. Now they want me to come in 4 days a week. So I’m looking for a new job now. Which is a shame, because I do like the job.
Remote rocket ship and hiring dot cafe
.
What does your contract say? With this back to work bullshit I made sure my contract explicitly said I was remote.
Doesn’t mean they won’t change their mind but maybe I’ll get severance instead of fired for cause of they have a back to the office push.
most hires don’t get contracts
edit: in USA. we get offer letters, take it or leave it. your job duties can change on the fly, no “contract” to abide by. do the job or leave/get fired. there is some negotiating room, but not a lot
Huh? All jobs come with an employment contract.
You must not be in america. We’re lucky if we get breaks.
So if the employer suddenly decides to e.g. start paying you less, how do you prove how much your pay should be?
There is nearly always a contract and the business will submit tax paperwork with your compensation to the IRS.
Under the table workers are illegal and on their own
Previous pay stubs I suppose. Depending on the employer you may have something in writing. This typically wouldn’t be contract if you’re an employee without a union.
Someone does some digging and figures it out, and maybe five or so years later you get a check in the mail for an amount the lawyers agreed was correct.
I’m an American and I’ve always had a contract. Even in retail. Of course the contracts are all bullshit and just a waiver of my rights.
an employment offer letter is not a contract.
Land of the free and all that. Free from paid healthcare, a decent public education, a strong voice in government, an impartial justice system, employee rights… With all this freedom, it’s hard to imagine wanting to be anywhere else.
Freedom to treat your employees however you want!
That’s cute you believe that
My dude, we’re talking about remote work office jobs. Not some random under the table shit.
My dude, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s me in fact.
Even if I had a contract it wouldn’t matter as I live in a right to work state, they can fire me at any point without warning or cause.
Having any real employment contract is NOT the norm here.
Non office jobs are more likely to be unionized and this have a contract than office jobs.
That’s the type of thing non W2 self employed contractors or union members might have to lean back on, not rank and file full time office employees.
The term of art in employment law is “constructive dismissal”
Good tip, I’ll double check that
keep me updated!
Keep us updated!
And my axe!
We need the update more than a windows user need a rollback.
That’s an exaggeration…
Man we had someone in the army do this. Army doctrine is either outdated or very accessible to the poor, I don’t fuckin know, but you aren’t required to have a phone.
So this one weird junior Joe just decided he didn’t need a phone. Got rid of it, and as a result never got the information he needed on army shit. I loved him for it, and by the law he was in the right. Can’t tell him to get a phone.
Unfortunately I was his team lead, and every time my chain of command decided to put out bullshit last minute information over text I had to tell them to suck it and pvt NoPhone wouldn’t be at their surprise formation.
Sometimes for important stuff I would have to drive to the barracks and knock on homies door to let him know there’s surprise inspections or piss tests and shit.
The workplace should operate entirely without external communication. It worked since the dawn of man, and it should continue to work until the end of man if we want any semblance of work-life balance.
pvt NoPhone
Love this bit. Gonna steal it :D
As retired Army, this is freakin’ phenomenal. I hope that dude is doing well today.
If I had to guess, the reason for the lack of a phone requirement is that, if the army required everyone to have phones, the army would need to pay for them, too. I’m sure the army loves spending money on things like that.
Which you know makes sense. What if aliens invade? We need the team assembled!
I always refused to put work apps on my personal phone because they would make you agree to some bullshit where they could remote access your phone or potentially wipe it. So I would refuse and say they needed to provide a company phone for me if it was that important. Most companies are either ok with this or provide a phone, except for one company. This was a software company, and literally everything else about this company was a unicorn of a job. But for some reason they wanted me to have slack on my phone and also wouldn’t give me a company phone. So I dug up an old phone, reset it to factory settings, and added slack to that so I could say I did it. Then I put the phone away and they never asked about it again. So I really don’t know what the point of that was 🤷
for some reason they wanted me to have slack
I get similar requirements from school and kindergarten nowadays. They want me to install weird apps for communications. Last school had an online portal on the web and mail. That was a no brainer but these apps?
Hello Waydroid.
Not gonna taint my own phone with this stuff. That includes WhatsApp.
Same as. Certain family members expect everyone to be on Facebook and also drink all of Zucks Kool-Aid.
I just don’t go to those family events, unless I’m personally invited. If an event only exists of Facebook, it does not exist to me.
I have 2FA apps on my phone for work. I also have the horrendous HR app for applying for Annual Leave. If they insist that I need more work-related apps on my personal phone, I will be getting a second phone and using that exclusively for work. It will be turned off when I walk out the door at the end of the day and kept in my office drawer.
I really don’t mind these days as long as they have a MDM so I can have it on a separate profile, but without that I’m totally with you.
How does the separate profile keep the company from factory resetting the whole device?
Because they can only see, install, or wipe things inside the work profile. It’s all sandboxed.
Quick edit: This is for Android. I have no idea about iPhones.
I don’t believe iPhone allows this, or at least the customers at my work don’t enable it for iOS.
I hadn’t had to set it up myself though so I wasnt sure. I would rather avoid the MDM altogether if possible.
I shot a message to a colleague who is still in IT (I’m into other shit these days) and he says you’re correct. IOS doesn’t allow for this. The IT department running Mobile Device Management would have to set up Mobile App Management (MAM) on their side. So it’s possible that they only get access to those apps without giving them access to the whole device but a lot of lazy departments won’t do it.
Well that explains why one of the other teams clients revolted against intune and switched to just using MFA for o365.
Its funny, they are so jaded by the MDM they keep grilling people about the MFA and if it gives access to their phones, etc.
I also think some people are starting to catch on to Microsoft’s apps collecting too much data, including MFA. Theres a big banner when you first set it up asking for permission.
I get it, and I don’t blame anyone for that choice. I made mine based on utility, convenience, and knowledge of the tool for me. I don’t care how convenient it makes things for work. They’ll give me a phone if it’s that convenient for them. But I’m not qualified to make that decision for anyone else.
What’s MDM?
Mobile device management. Basically software to manage mobile devices owned by a company.
Or work profiles on BYODs
Thank you
Thank you
While I agree with you and understand that perfectly, slack doesn’t have that remote management thing, so far I’ve only seen that Microsoft apps.
Its a feature of mobile device management software. Intune for microsoft is one but theres also intelligent hub/airwatch, citrix, manageengine, etc.
It’s less cognitively taxing for me if you just comply with whatever I’ve decided
Amazing
I love this.
Zeitgeist material
We did it, classic
I don’t like the font.
Would be less cognitively taxing for them if you did.
My current pet peeve is Email servers (MS Office) configured to only allow connections from outlook. I’d be happy to add an account to Aquamail but they won’t let me. So no work emails on my phone or personal laptop.
Ditto, but this is actually a bonus for me.
“Didn’t you see my email and message last evening?”
“Not until I got in today, because it came after I had logged off and I can’t see that stuff on my personal phone because, you know, IT policy.”
It’s a trade off because it’s handy when you’re at an appointment.
Why did you, why would you, ever have work email and Teams on your phone in the first place?
Personally, I had Slack then teams mobile for work because I didn’t mind helping outside normal work hours on one off stuff.
At my last job I managed a team of developers in India (while residing in the US). It was pretty much necessary for me to be available outside of my company’s normal work hours. I always compensated myself for middle-of-the-night activity with time off during the day and nobody ever mentioned having a problem with it. I was eventually rewarded by being laid off with everybody else when my company was acquired by a west coast tech giant.
Got me in the first half
To prep my day. As a late shift I want to know what I am walking into rather than be anxiety ridden for my 4 hours of day light. That being said I don’t respond I just check to see what is happening
Which is weird cause the savings in not comming in to center is a win for everyone.
The corporate office I work at panicked because they were going to get reclassified as a “remote hub” for tax purposes, which would have reduced everyone’s pay. But I’d personally prefer to take the cut instead…
Oh didn’t know that was a thing.
Not the real estate the finance industry relies on for REITs, think of all those poor restaurants opened in downtown wherever. No nobody will eat there now rent payments are being missed and REITs are dipping. Uh oh
It’s true. I doubt the corps care though. Seems like the reason is millions of people live outside the city. Maybe find a way to make then want to stay by I dk making more residential buildings that are affordable.
But how am I supposed to control my workers if they work from home?
Lol same energy as How am I supposed to make sure my partner doesn’t cheat on me if I don’t GPS tag him?
Keep telling the DBAs that my company outsourced a big chunk of their tech stack to that its against company policy to work all the way on the other side of the planet, but they refuse to show up to the office.
Ol Reliable…
This is basically how I get new privileges at work…
Now if only I could convince them that I don’t have enough hours to do my job, while still being able to do enough of my job without getting fired…
No really they cut my hours and I’m still pissed about it.
A previous job of mine wanted people in my team to volunteer for being on call overnight for a week at a time.
No-one did, so they forced us. I emailed all managers involved including HR I said that I would like to opt-out for various reasons like family, mental and physical health, and also that the pay was in no way adequate for what they wanted. Again they pushed, so I replied with I’ll do it but would be unavailable most afternoons and evenings with my kids and things they have on. That I also won’t be able to answer after going to sleep because I take my mental health very seriously and need quality sleep to function.
So the first night I slept peacefully as I normally do as I have my phone set to go to DND automatically. I got called in because I didn’t answer a call that came in last night, I asked when it was, about midnight, and said well that’s because I was asleep.
Go to the next 2 mangers up, say the same thing and they say that I need to answer. I explain the email stating that I would be unable to answer calls at many times including when asleep and how no-one replied with that being a problem. One of the managers was like, wait up, you flagged this; yup; can you send me the email chain; yup. Got removed and told I wouldn’t need to worry about doing it anymore.
It found a new job shortly after that.
Sounds like a 3rd world ultra capitalist creepy story. I grew up in center right 3rd world (Brazil) and that would make it a truthful but funny snectode.
Now I’m in center center 1st world (Australia) and we’ve got passed a law a few months ago to not bother employee for bullshit.
I though why did we fn need a law for that, then your story reminds me.
Yeah great law, really put the breaks on my old boss. He would email and call at like 10pm at night about shit.
Now I work for myself and can’t get away from my boss haba
