SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?
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Here's two important takeaways I think people should have...
- If you represent an employer, you should never want to have employees that are adversarial with you. You want to be a good employer that encourages employees to like working there and seek the common good. Good employers should want to benefit employees, and employees should want the business to do well. It's mutually beneficial. If it isn't, rethink things. If you are doing things as an employer to negatively impact your employees beyond what is necessary (like making them work, lol) why? That's just shitty. If your employees hurt work just to hurt the business, why are you paying them? There's always someone who will appreciate the job. Be a team, or move on.
- As an employee, you shouldn't want to work in an environment where you don't desire the success of the whole. Employment is a huge portion of our lives and being happy with your work, with your career, are keys to being a happy person. If you feel hostility towards your job or your career, move on. There are other employers out there. If we were more aggressive about leaving bad ones, bad ones would be less common. One of the reasons that bad employers thrive is because people just put up with it. And the more good employees put up with bad employers, the fewer good employers are out there.
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@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
Here's two important takeaways I think people should have...
- If you represent an employer, you should never want to have employees that are adversarial with you. You want to be a good employer that encourages employees to like working there and seek the common good. Good employers should want to benefit employees, and employees should want the business to do well. It's mutually beneficial. If it isn't, rethink things. If you are doing things as an employer to negatively impact your employees beyond what is necessary (like making them work, lol) why? That's just shitty. If your employees hurt work just to hurt the business, why are you paying them? There's always someone who will appreciate the job. Be a team, or move on.
- As an employee, you shouldn't want to work in an environment where you don't desire the success of the whole. Employment is a huge portion of our lives and being happy with your work, with your career, are keys to being a happy person. If you feel hostility towards your job or your career, move on. There are other employers out there. If we were more aggressive about leaving bad ones, bad ones would be less common. One of the reasons that bad employers thrive is because people just put up with it. And the more good employees put up with bad employers, the fewer good employers are out there.
While you make good points there is an obvious advantage for the company supplying IT and office equipment for the employee and that is taxation.
Most countries have sales tax and payroll tax so when an employee (not a company) buys something for his own money, that money has been heavily taxed already.
So in a win-win scenario for the maximum benefit of everyone, an employee should never buy anything for his own money that a company can buy.
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@Pete-S said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
Most countries have sales tax and payroll tax so when an employee (not a company) buys something for his own money, that money has been heavily taxed already.
So in a win-win scenario for the maximum benefit of everyone, an employee should never buy anything for his own money that a company can buy.In countries with that tax situation, and a relationship that allows for it, I agree wholeheartedly.
The approach that we often take is... if you can, use what you have when you start. Once you've been with the company and your stuff is up for replacement, don't spend your own money, let the company spend that money (but save enough to buy your own so if you quit or something, you aren't scrambling... but that's just logical, not something we tell them to do.) This is kind of the best of all worlds to me in a practical sense...
No one takes a bit risk in buying new, unnecessary hardware for no reason and no one takes a risk of putting that equipment in an unknown location. Then when it is time to spend money, the company does so with a maximum of resources (e.g. strongest buying power.) It's bidirectional. Everyone does what is best and produces the maximum benefit for the whole at the least cost. In the long run, everyone wins.
And we are edging this concept towards housing. We've got the a couple employees in company housing with a third moving in in a week or so. Early days and testing the waters, but we believe in exactly that concept. We can bankroll a mortgage differently than an employee can. We take on the risk because if the employee quits another can take over the housing. We can pay cash for houses where mortgage rates are high. So the benefit to the employee is far larger than the cost to the company. It's a great use of resources.
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wow - the whole company owns your house thing seems super scary to me. You fire me and I'm instantly homeless... I don't even necessarily have a lease to protect me for some remaining months - and even if you put a lease in place, without a provision like - if fired the employee can pay xxx rate for 6 months while finding new accommodations, after which time they must move out. Of course a provision like this is bad for the company, because they have no place to put the replacement person for 6 months...
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But speaking to the point Scott makes about using your own equipment and where the line is...
If you work in an office - you are required to have a wardrobe the office requires - you aren't paid extra for that. Sure you can likely wear that wardrobe other places as well, but how likely is that really?
As Scott pointed out - you are responsible for providing your transportation to the office (at least in USA, and I assume in Canada and EU). In USA and Canada this almost exclusively means you need to own a car, unless you live in one of around 8 (and it's probably more like 3) cities that have unbelievably good public transportation. OK Transportation - so that means owning a car - something most companies pay zero for.again as mentioned, you're not paid for your commute time, etc.
why are these things acceptable? these are all things that cost YOU because you work for THEM.
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Now the flip side of that - the company allows you to work from home, but considering today's work environment, we assume most home workers will be using stuff like zoom, and the wardrobe (at least the top) is still required.
transportation no longer is - employee saving
commute time - employee savingBut
the company to no longer has a building - HUGE company savings
power bill greatly reduced - company saving
ISP likely reduced - company savingI see a situation where this money spent on buildings goes to the employees so the employees can have homes that specifically cater to their work from home lives - i.e. a dedicated office space. Studies have shown the specific space is a function that allows an employee to more mentally break from work when most work is done in that office space, and life/family is done elsewhere.
Of course that said - the blend that Scott mentioned is important too - you need two hours in the middle of the day to do something with your kids - whatever it may be - you work two hours later that night to fulfill your work day.
But to that end I ask Scott - with unlimited vacation - where is the line? You mentioned that someone had a baby and took months off on vacation - so we assume this means paid... there has to be a line somewhere. The company needs to make money off the labor of the employee, otherwise why have them on staff? even more - why pay them?
And when not on vacation - what do you use to measure their output to ensure you're still getting enough value from their labor to keep them employed by you? -
@Dashrender said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
wow - the whole company owns your house thing seems super scary to me. You fire me and I'm instantly homeless... I don't even necessarily have a lease to protect me for some remaining months
That's definitely a scary proposition. And I feel similarly about not owning a computer or Internet or other basic necessities of job hunting. While obviously drastically more minor, the idea of losing a job and then instantly needing to invest in a new computer at the worst possible time and potentially needing to make an emergency austerity budget decision around it that might be mostly wasted weeks later is scary too. Not to the same degree, but the most of your basic needs that the company provides, the more trapped you feel. Company provided equipment, even just a little thing like your laptop, can sound like a good thing (like those mandatory factory breaks) on the surface, but can actually be a company attempting to make the job "stickier" than it otherwise would be.
Of course, even if the company provides you a house, car, power, Internet and computer... nothing stops you from buying all of that yourself, too. But the real benefits of it come from not having to do those things. If you buy them AND the company duplicates them, there's money wasted in the system and no matter what we feel like, at the end of the day the more an employee costs to employ the less salary bargaining power they have. Losses caused by employment decisions will invariably be paid for by the employee, not the investors.
So I agree, that feeling is one that definitely I get and find it hard to imagine people wanting to have something like that provided for that particular reason (to avoid having one of their own.)
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@Dashrender said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
But to that end I ask Scott - with unlimited vacation - where is the line? You mentioned that someone had a baby and took months off on vacation - so we assume this means paid... there has to be a line somewhere. The company needs to make money off the labor of the employee, otherwise why have them on staff? even more - why pay them?
Funny enough, just this week said employee was promoted to a director position.
So where is the line? I think there is only one line and the thing that varies is only how fuzzy it is (I'm not sure I can describe what I mean on that but I'll try.)
The line is "value". Does the employee create value to the company? And how much compared to other employees or potential employees? And that, essentially, is it.
Example to follow....
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Mark comes to work. Mark works one day a year and takes 364 days off. In that one day Mark provides brilliant work (he designs a car, proposes a new software design, writes an amazing poem, whatever) that generates $500,000 of profits before we remove his salary.
He wants a salary of $100,000.
Done. No questions asked. 400% profit on his labor, no matter how little that labor is, is a no brainer.
This is an EXTREME example, but apply the logic to any scale. If an employee is valuable, then their behaviour is acceptable.
More real world example....
Betty and Sue both earn $100K/year. Betty completes 1,000 help desk tickets annually and the assessments say that this is solidly valuable as a benchmark (good luck proving that, but just assume it's solid.) She does this working 49 weeks of the year, takes 3 weeks of vacation. Sue also completes 1,000 help desk tickets annually but does so in 47 weeks of work and takes 5 weeks of vacation.
There is something to be said for coverage, and that's not to be ignored. But for this simple example, assume it's not a concern. It's engineering tickets, not administration.
In this example, while ridiculously contrived, we have a way to measure profitability and comparative results. They take different amounts of vacation, but they work the same amount. Both are valuable and simply choosing to work at different paces day to day to allow for different vacation amounts throughout the year.
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@Dashrender said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
what do you use to measure their output to ensure you're still getting enough value from their labor to keep them employed by you?
This is hard, of course, BUT it is something you have to tackle regardless of any of this. You need to be measuring employee value, one way or another, to know if you have hired well, what to change, when you need to hire again, if you need to do layoffs, if you need to hope for attrition and so forth.
Every job role is different, and to some degree, you have to fudge it. I hate that, but that's fact. You can't completely measure everything and attempting to do so is dangerous. But if you are watching your staff, we generally can get a pretty good idea of productivity and value. You have to know the business and the staff, but typically you can do it pretty well.
In your example (of mine) it was someone who, at the time, was a project manager and was able to completely offload duties well for nine months, and was an excellent employee before taking nine months off, and has been excellent after returning. Even better afterwards (hence the directorship promotion) as she has a really serious appreciation for the dedication of the company to employee wellness.
She's also an example of someone who provided a laptop of her own when she started, no questions asked. And when it broke, the company shipped one to her house for her, also no questions asked (actually, her boss at the time drove the laptop six hours to an international border and handed it to her at a border crossing.)
Which leads to the other story, she's also our employee that has, for medical reasons, had to move twice to different countries. She left her home country of Bolivia because she needed medical care in Brazil. Then, when the situation in Brazil became bad and her medical needs had changed, she moved her family to Argentina and now works for us in our southern most home office, in Salta.
Valentina and I are scheduled to visit her there in May as we do a tour of the southern offices and staff locations.
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@Dashrender said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
You fire me and I'm instantly homeless... I don't even necessarily have a lease to protect me for some remaining months - and even if you put a lease in place, without a provision like - if fired the employee can pay xxx rate for 6 months while finding new accommodations, after which time they must move out.
A factor worth considering in our case.... most staff in markets outside of North America don't have their own houses and those that do it is a major hardship and in nearly all cases, the ability to simply move back home with family is assumed. It's a different cultural region and the idea of getting a private house to yourself, is a big deal. And the risk of being homeless is minor as that's not something people normally face. Of course most Americans CAN move back in with parents in a dire emergency, but we consider it almost worse than living under a bridge in a tent. But in most of the world, it is only considered mildly inconvenient.
But, when you live at home or have a lot of family at home, the idea of working from home gets much harder. In American work from home generally means large quiet homes with almost no one around. Outside of the US, working from home often means a laptop on the kitchen table surrounded by ten family members who are also home all day and a level of noise Americans struggle to even picture. So providing a home, for work from home, can mean a very different type of scenario.
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@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
I work more like 80-100 hours per week, and I agree that getting sleep is really hard for sure (that's more about my dogs than my work, though) but I get tons and tons of time with my kids.
How much non-work related IT learning do you do a week?
Average 90 hours of work, that's 13 hours a day. Let's say an hour or exercise, an hour for eating (assuming someone else is cooking for you), an hour for showering, dressing etc. An hour for life chores (DIY, ironing, tax returns etc), an hour with the kids, an hour for non-IT hobbies (though surely you must spend more than that recording and editing your YouTube travelogue) - that's 18 hours. We're down to 6 hours left. Then we have time with friends and family (1 hour?), and time travelling (1 hour?). That leaves you with 4 hours for sleep and everything else. I don't see how you can sit down and do extra IT learning?
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
How much non-work related IT learning do you do a week?
Well, a lot really. And more importantly, it's about nearly all learning, not just IT (work or not.) More than work IT learning, I would say.
Now you can argue that as a CIO, all learning ends up being work one way or another, and that's really the point. As IT pros, the scope we need to really deliver value is enormous. Knowing things that are way out of scope for what work would request doesn't make it not work, just not something work would see as work.
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
That leaves you with 4 hours for sleep and everything else. I don't see how you can sit down and do extra IT learning?
Well I average three hours a night, it's rough.
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
Let's say an hour or exercise, an hour for eating (assuming someone else is cooking for you), an hour for showering, dressing etc. An hour for life chores (DIY, ironing, tax returns etc)
All of this I condense. Not saying it's good, just if you want to look at my own example. Exercise, what's that (no seriously, my foot is broken so I'm not doing much of that), showering is fast (no hot water here, trust me, you don't dawdle), eating/chores - I don't do these, I have a 50 hour a week housekeeper and a live in chef and eat most meals at my desk while in meetings. Is that good? Not saying it is, I'm not recommending my work schedule to anyone, but it's how I do it.
If you are going to work those super long hours, you have to find creative ways to keep life together. When I worked in hedge funds where they demanded those kinds of hours, they provided chefs during the day, at desk food delivery, and catered meals after the chefs went home. It doesn't fix long hours, but it's a proper means of accommodating it.
But I'm not a good example case. Let's think about my teams, not me. I work insane hours not because I work in IT but because I'm an entrepreneur (and a workaholic.) Most of my teams are expected to work 40 hours a week (when not taking time off) and we actually have some enforcement of that (we attempt to track hours and tell people to sign out.) People can work flexible hours, but the total amount should be limited to 40 unless they do scheduled nights or weekends, then we lower their work week to 32 (or somewhere in the middle if it's like just one weekend day.)
Forty hours a week, with zero commute time, ability to have kids around when they work, walking pets during work, etc. Means that compared to an average US knowledge worker who spends 50+ hours a week clocked in and more than ~8 hours per week commuting, they have almost 20 hours a week above that work time for other things. I'm not asking (at all, I make no request) them to spend that time learning things instead of being with family or whatever, but we hire creative, interesting people that we hope are taking an interest in... things. IT sure, development maybe, other hobbies and so forth. People who are pushing themselves to grow. IT is business, and business is broad. Essentially all knowledge benefits business eventually. Just having better thinking eventually helps.
But more importantly, it's having people who are prepared to learn if we aren't pushing them. Sure, work might get demanding (most weeks it is not, they get a lot of downtime on average) but what about the time before we hire them?
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
time travelling (1 hour?).
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@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
I'm not asking (at all, I make no request) them to spend that time learning things instead of being with family or whatever, but we hire creative, interesting people that we hope are taking an interest in... things. IT sure, development maybe, other hobbies and so forth. People who are pushing themselves to grow. IT is business, and business is broad. Essentially all knowledge benefits business eventually.
Weren't you literally arguing that anyone who doesn't study IT that is unrelated to the IT in their day job, in their own time, on their own laptop, is not a "GOOD" employee and you wouldn't want to hire them?
Most of my team have interesting hobbies - archery, hunting, pottery, house renovating, scout leadership, and most of them study and learn in their own time. But that study is all related to our day jobs - Microsoft business applications. No-one is learning Linux (for example) for fun as far as I know. My simple argument is that I am fine with that and don't consider any of my team BAD employees as a result. It appears you do.
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
But that study is all related to our day jobs - Microsoft business applications. No-one is learning Linux (for example) for fun as far as I know. My simple argument is that I am fine with that and don't consider any of my team BAD employees as a result. It appears you do.
So that's a great example of things I worry about with my team. If the team only really knows one thing here are a few business risks...
- Who is advising the business honestly and fairly to know when the product studied remains the best product (or approach, of the best answer is to stop using "products" altogether in these cases.) that isn't unreasonably influences by their experience focused on a single product.
- Does this pose a business risk that the team isn't prepared to make a pivot should business priorities and/or product value change (such as a product going off of the market or its cost going up 10x or that product moving to Linux like MS SQL Server did... now teams who have that focused MS only expertise and no longer the cost effective teams for managing SQL Server - Linux teams do it with less labour and support costs, AND with less licensing cost from MS, too!)
- Does this create a risk of the IT team feeling a loyalty to a product or vendor over their employer because they depend on that one product being kept and valued. We see this constantly, IT teams keeping alternatives or lying about alternatives to their companies in order to avoid losing their jobs or having to keep their skills broadly up to date.
So yes, if I had a team that was set on only learning what they need to not get fired, but not to provide risk abatement, IT advisement and other aspects that we should consider critical of people in IT roles that seems like falling short of a bar I'd want to keep employed. Not that I'd fire people for that, as long as they aren't actively sabotaging the environment, but it would certainly represent a failure in identifying candidates that we'd want. I'd consider that an employment aspect of technical debt if we were "held hostage" by the inflexibility of the team and stuck with legacy decisions not because we continue to deem them the right decisions but because we'd tied ourselves to a team that no longer has the necessary skills to handle the job that might be needed.
Even the most entry level positions, people fixing printer issues or assisting in desk side support, I expect to have some interesting in their careers and be in a position to have some scope outside of repetitive tasks and be able to provide some amount of guidance either to customers directly or back to the IT management at least to allow them to filter through more experience.
In your example, we face teams like that all of the time and when we talk to management about outsourcing those roles some of the key things we always say is "moving from people just pressing buttons to people who help you decide which buttons to press and if you should be pressing them at all" and moving from "teams telling you what to run to keep their jobs to people telling you what to run to benefit your business." If you aren't learning more broadly or prepared for things outside of the immediate task, how does your team provide the "IT" portion of IT to the business? How do you keep from promoting the MS solutions because they benefit you (because it's what keeps you employed) rather than pointing out when they are a problem and the business might benefit from something else?
That's why I fear that task focus. That's why we don't like to hire people who can "hit the ground running" with one single or a specifically matching skillset. It's great for a month or six. But in the long run, you start to lose sight of the big picture.
In the most extreme, I've seen that mentality put a company totally out of business because every decision was made around buying products the team knew at any cost because the moment that they didn't they rightfully knew management would fire them as management had no IT oversight and thought you hired and fired based on task skills and never, ever hire IT pros that make decisions or use insight. And so they bought loads of products, none of which could do the job, and nothing that actually did the job and eventually and obviously the company ran out of money and closed its doors. That's extreme.
In your example I'm sure MS' ERP products are working fine. They might even be the best choice. But will they always be the best choice? Will they even remain on the market? Is anyone actually evaluating the total cost? Is it in everyones' collective interest to hide the available options? Those are big risks from an inflexible team.
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
Weren't you literally arguing that anyone who doesn't study IT that is unrelated to the IT in their day job, in their own time, on their own laptop, is not a "GOOD" employee and you wouldn't want to hire them?
I think you are mixing the concepts of people we'd hire vs. those we continue to employ. 100% I want people who learn on their own when we hire them, which is why they need a computer at home already. Like I keep saying, I generally recommend providing tools to employees, but much less likely to potential employees.
An employee whose laptop dies and needs a replacement, we provide those. But a candidate who doesn't have a computer at all? That isn't very likely to be a viable candidate.
But as people have pointed out, it's kind of evil, in a way, to provide their computer, Internet, housing because, like in your situation, if your employer decided to let you go, you'd be without a computer and if you want to get to serious job hunting or skill expansion to prepare for your next position you'd be in the position of not being ready to hit the ground running, have to buy a computer in a rush at the worst possible time, and having to do so at a time when most people would be moving into an austerity budget. While it is a very light point when only talking about a laptop, it's a means of making employees dependent on the employer and feel just a little bit trapped. It makes the overhead (and fear) of seeking alternative employment higher.
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
But that study is all related to our day jobs - Microsoft business applications. No-one is learning Linux (for example) for fun as far as I know. My simple argument is that I am fine with that and don't consider any of my team BAD employees as a result. It appears you do.
I think "bad" is a strong word there. I would say "not ideal candidates." If I had no other options, would it be an absolute line in the sand? No. If I had people who had more interest, put me at less risk, represented more value to the organization of course I'd want them, strongly.
I hate that the answer has to be "you'd not be a candidate that I'd move on to a second round interview", but when you frame it this way, honestly, no, you'd not likely get the first interview. The things we value most, excitement, passion, self learning... those things we can't teach or change later are what feel like they are missing.
I want a team that says "I can't wait to get home to my kids", not a team that says "I can't wait to get out of here." Both want to leave the office, both have somewhere better to be. But in one case it's because family is a higher priority. In the other, it's because work is a drag, a necessary evil. There's a big difference.
IT is a field where two things I think are really important:
- Passion drives value above all things.
- There's no actual shortage of passionate IT people.
Sure, I want people who are MORE passionate about their kids than work. But I don't want people working just for a paycheck, I want people who are happy to be here, love their career (and job), support each other, grow, encourage one another and foster an environment of fun, excitement, value, creativity... those are essentially impossible when "learning and growth" are seen as job chores and when learning is only done for the express purpose of completing the immediate job function.
