I reviewed the article about Dell changing its WFH stance and I believe that they were completely in the wrong here. Dell has reversed course from being pro-working from home. Dell's stance is a complete 180 from encouraging working from home, and their CEO stating that: "If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you’re doing it wrong." COVID forced many companies to go online and go remote and it has shown to be for the better as employees are happier when it comes to work-life balance.
So Dell went from that to requiring their workers to be in office in order to be considered for a promotion. So what changed? Dell laid off 5% of their employees and then forced the rest of their employees to come back into the office. Why did the Dell CEO go from being so in favor of WFH to basically outlawing it if you want to be successful at the company?
It is odd that such a drastic and sudden change happened within the company, and I am unsure why it happened. I believe that this will chase away potential employees. Why set conditions for employees regarding in-office attendance instead of their productivity or performance? Dell should adjust this policy soon to remain competitive and show that they care about the work-life balance of their employees. There is nothing wrong with working in the office but essentially banning it seems drastic in today's work climate.
I could be wrong but I almost feel that the return to office was a way for companies to make large layoffs easy. Some companies basically laid off anyone that didn't want to return to office. It doesn't sound like this is what Dell did because they did lay offs before the return to office. I was surprised as well because I thought companies benefitted from work from home because they lessened their overhead. They no longer had to pay for large offices, lavish corporate lunches etc. There must have been an impact on productivity, however I have yet to see any big companies outwardly state that work from home hurt their overall productivity.
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