‘Don’t Mess With Us’: WebMD Parent Company Demands Return to Office in Bizarre Video::“I’ve seen better acting by hostages in direct to DVD movies,” one anonymous worker wrote about the video.
“We’re not asking we’re informing” lollll
Having said that… People working from home has been the biggest frustration in my work for the past three years. I specifically picked a company where people like to come in, and are required to for at least three days. I want to work with people, not anonymous voices with cameras switched off not responding to calls and messages (I’m sure they’re all hard at work lmao)
Incidentally you’re one of the reasons the majority of workers don’t want to return to the office.
Oh and they will. And when you’re company loses the best and brightest in the field because no one enjoys spending time and money going to the office. If it’s that important, why doesn’t your company pay for everyone to drive to and from work (covering gas, car repairs, and allowing employees to clock in when they start their commute.)Also, pay for everyone’s lunch since they have to be there.
I’ll say this. What works for you doesn’t always work for everyone else, and I feel like that’s kind of the point. The CEO/CFO cares more about bringing people back to the office than they do about their employees. I hear you, it’s healthy to interact with people, and If that’s what you need awesome. But a lot of other people don’t feel that same way. I think it’s going to take tolerance on both sides for this paradigm shift to be a success.
It depends on the kind of work you do. My work is very collaborative, and despite trying I’ve not found online collaboration as effective.
It doesn’t help that the people working from home seem to have very different priorities.
It sounds like your working environment is a bit shit and I’d wager that it’s not because there are remote workers.
I have to be arbitrarily in the office 1-2 days a week. Its absolutely collaborative work and I have 3-4 different “stand up” meetings a day for various teams. Well, when I’m in the office thise happen with everyone sat at their own desk on Zoom because the team is not all in one location. Being in the office feels completely pointless and there’s literally not one task I do that can’t be performed from home.
This is entirely a cultural problem if that’s what you experience with remote employees.
My company is remote-first with WeWorks for those who want them. Every meeting 90% of people have their cameras on, and the other 10% are either attending to something more important than the meeting or just not feeling it that day. No one questions them or gets onto them because we’re not children.
If many people regularly have their cameras off in meetings then maybe your meeting isn’t worth their full attention, and they’re working on something else. Not every meeting needs everyone to be there. I’d wager part of the reason my company doesn’t have this problem is we have an extremely low meeting culture. Impromptu meetings/discussions are encouraged and we often Slack huddle for 5-10 minutes when needed which cuts out a lot of the bullshit.
At my prior job we accounted for 2 hours a day of meetings when planning and it was a fucking drag. Now I have 3 1/2 hours of recurring meetings per week, with a sync for new projects/initiatives every few weeks. I get so much more done every day because I’m not listening to an endless stream of information which should have been an email.
As a consumer, I will now forever remember that WebMD’s C Suite is most interested in “crushing their competition” and being heavy handed with their employees. I once thought that they were concerned about the betterment of societal health. This is how you lose your most performant employees.
I can’t believe they published this to a publically available platform like Vimeo. Did they already lose their Marketing executive?
They run a website that helps you self diagnose even the slightest illness as cancer.
With Kagi, WebMD never showing up again is just two clicks away:
Aaand done!
and if for whatever reason you don’t want to pay for Kagi, you can use uBlacklist to achieve the same thing with a search engine of your choice https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
I’m so tired of businesses claiming that the only way for a company to be successful is if everyone is in person for the dear dear meetings. We all know exactly what this is about. 1. It’s more dofficult to micromanage employees when a manger can’t constantly observe them, and 2. All the giant real estate investments companies have made is now coming due and they cant fill up their buildings fast enough to get those tax breaks. Why the hell else are they “tracking” people in the office. Meanwhile senior leadership can come and go whenever they see fit. It’s control. Plain and simple.
My company had a badge in/badge out procedure, badge out was new after covid. No one actually badged out. They have since installed security guards at all exits and they will chase you out the door if you forget to badge out.
All the giant real estate investments companies have made is now coming due and they cant fill up their buildings fast enough to get those tax breaks
What are these tax breaks for filling up buildings?
They don’t exist. This made up tale about commercial real estate driving RTO policies has been around since early 2021 when things started opening back up on larger scales. It’s a fiction that just won’t die.
Because it’s not fiction. City leaders and even Congress, at the behest of lobbyists, have clearly urged RTO as a cure to real estate woes.
US Real Estate Firms Urge Federal Government To Bring Workers Back to the Office
WebMD is owned by Internet Brands, which is owned by KKR, an investment group with $64 billion in real estate assets. This has fuck all to do with productivity or middle management.
Fuckin kkr. The ones who got Toys R Us to go bankrupt just to make a buck. They also purchased the company i worked for then sold it to another company which resulted in big layoffs some years back. They can eat shit and die.
There are company’s where their whole business strategy is to get their employees on the board of a struggling company with the plan to enact policies that seem like they will help but just dig the hole deeper. Until they can start selling off assets, move to bankruptcy, then sail away with golden parachutes to do it all again.
It’s time for a boycott WebMD campaign. Let’s see how well they handle THAT 👹
You have it backwards. Completely.
- I have no intentions of bringing my work home, work is a job, it has no place in my home impacting my family.
- I will not lose a part of my home to my jobs business. Its not their property, it is my home.i would rather the office be a bedroom so my children dont have to share a room.
- We evolved without video conferencing, it is natural and easier to meet with someone in person to convey emotion and understand people we meet with. It is too easy to dismiss someone over a screen, empathy is too easily lost. It is also harder to be ignored in person.
- I can see when my ataff are struggling off meeting or when talking to others and help them. This is a bit micro-managey however I value the insight especially for staff that struggle to communicate.
The only thing I loath about working in another building is: the commute and distractions. The commute is expensive and a huge waste of time. I try and minimise the time waste with audio books but its forced waste of money. The distractions can be minimised with headphones.
I’d say it depends on the job and the person. If it’s the sort of job that can be done remotely, and the office culture is such that people are constantly getting interrupted by people ‘just passing by’ and ‘oh one more quick question’, and/or dragged into hours-long meetings that could easily have been a quick email thread, then it’s not a stretch at all to see that WFH has improved their productivity.
The realestate claim is just plain backwards. It does depend on the person, but making the claim that people in general are happy to donate part of their home to their employer and impact their families with work from home is just wrong. Emails instead of meetings should be common sense for status meetings and has no impact on the choice to work from home. Meetings that have agendas should be in person, especially if its on sensitive topics. All reasons I have listed above.
Some people sure do benefit working from home. I liked no commute, it saved a lot of money and wasted time but it made home worse.
We work to live. Work should have no place in our home.
All of their tech job openings are in India or Vietnam. I’d have assumed a major US health data handler would be developing onshore!
People who haven’t come in to the office yet do it for a reason. They like it. They are happier. Happier employees are better employees.
They get more sleep so they are more alert or have more time for hobbies and recreation. They don’t have to spend as much on gas or childcare. They don’t use the office’s electricity, water, facilities, coffee/snacks.
Make it a choice. For the betterment of humanity and the planet.
When someone makes videos like this, you don’t get the best people to come work for your company, you get the most desperate.
But then again, maybe that’s what they want. Idiots.
