WebMD will probably cease to exist either way. So, it might be best to start considering moving on anyway. The best resources will or already have. That is how RTO work. The more negative an constrained the work environment the more top performers decide it’s time to go elsewhere. I imagine WebMD may not think they need the best, brightest, or most driven anyway.
Shitbird’s barber must be phoning in his work, too. FFS, how mentally deficient do you have to be to go out in public looking like Big Bird fucked Beaker in a clown suit?
The headline is misleading, isn’t it? “Don’t mess with us” is used in the context of a rally cry on behalf of the company to it’s competition, not as a threat from management to employees. But yeah, everything else about this video and policy is straight garbage.
“Don’t mess with us” is the translation of the lyrics of the song playing at the end the execs are dancing to. Earlier in the video they do say they want to crush their competition and show a clip of a hand crushing a soda can.
The song is played as the outro so could be interpreted as a last word on the video as a whole. It’s not exactly clear what the intention of the lyrical translation is.
The CEO also states in the video that they are no longer asking nor negotiating, but informing of the policy. Seems pretty straight forward that it is a demand and that employees’ jobs are at jeopardy if they choose not to comply.
That looks like some expensive real estate. But it’s the need to get workers to collaborate in person “eye to eye” and absolutely nothing to do with the enormous monthly rent they can’t get out of. /s
That may be the goal - destroying working conditions to motivate attrition allows you to trim headcount without the hassle of layoffs or spooking shareholders.
Quote from a colleague who retired with her full pension last year and then went looking for a job this year:
For anyone who needs to hear this, there is no reason to stay on a team that is making you miserable. Opportunities abound.
There is a climate of desperation among employers because of a scarcity of folks with high level skills.
She left our group because our management has become “challenging”. However, as boneheaded as they are, they have not mandated RTO.
Of course, we’re a non-profit that doesn’t invest in rental properties. The only thing our CEO has said related to RTO (early in the pandemic) was why the hell are we paying so much for office space if people can do the same job from home?
edit:
I guess if you don’t have high-level skills, you are still kind of fucked, but you can do what everyone else does and work the shitty jobs until you have the skills and experience, then jump ship. I think MedMD might be hiring soon.
I work for a big corporation that most people have probably never heard of. Our CEO recently said something to the effect of “We’ve managed to recruit talent from all over the world because we’re flexible. Most of these companies that are doing RTO mandates are not doing well and we’re more than happy to take advantage of their bad business decisions.”
If you’re an executive who’s pushing RTO, just know that you’re gift wrapping your best talent and shipping them straight to your competitors. It might save you a little money now but it’s going to cost you a fortune in the long term.
Kind of assumed the executives pushing RTO aren’t concerned about long term company welfare. They want a minor quarterly bump so they can exit with their golden parachute.
If you are like me and just want to watch the video instead of reading articles referring to something that you haven’t yet watched, here is the place I was able to see the video. twitter.com/…/1745446449343795506
Are all of the department heads in the video talking about their perceived benefits of RTO standing in front of a green screen? Doesn’t that seem a little tone deaf?
Yeah they all seem green screened and a couple of the participants look like they’re reading off a cue card they themselves had no hand in writing and may have been given 2 minutes before being filmed.
“Don’t mess with us and our nepo baby middle managers, we have to keep them busy somehow and that somehow is micromanaging you all into the ground” -this guy, probably, if they were more honest
Managers can be fine, but middle managers are generally worthless IME. Not much value added by having someone manage the people that actually manage the people for a C level, too much abstraction just drives crushing corporate culture.
One additional detail, many corporations lease buildings. The buildings are often owned by executives from this same company.
Microsoft’s buildings (pre-pandemic there 130+ just in the Redmond/Seattle area) are all over, and many of them were owned by Paul Allen (co-founder of Msft), and now his family.
A lemmy post, linking to a Mastodon post (yes, the video is linked as a comment here), linking to a vice article.
Relatively normal so far.
Except, it’s an article about a video. The only copy of the video in the article is actually a twitter embed of the author posting the article and then replying to the tweet with the video.
In the first days of the Internet, just a drop of engagement could power a website for days. Now websites need 12 liters of engagement per hour. As engagement becomes more scarce, the Engagement Wars initially pit websites against each other, until they discovered they could exponentially increase engagement by all extracting a share instead of fighting over it.
Someday, we’ll use up all the engagement and move back to interacting only with our cats and dogs.
There’s an insect that eats nectar. Instead of doing it the bumblebee way which facilitates pollination, it pierces the outside bottom of the petals and "pirates nectar that way. Horny flower gets Pikachu face.
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