SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?
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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.
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
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.
So all of this can be framed in one way and taken as "Scott says you'd not be a good candidate for him." But there's a flipside. And that flipside is that my company isn't a company you'd want to work at either. I'm sure that goes both ways. It goes almost without saying that the things we value you'd hate as an employee.
Some people hate having to work from home. Some hate the flexibility. Hiring and being hired is a two ways street. I know you aren't saying it, but I can't see you ever having a conversation where you say "boy, I'd love to work for those guys." I get that.
We aren't a "here is the thing that you do" kind of company. We cross train, we constantly do new things, we take on different technology all of the time, everyone spends their days advising non-IT on approaches, options, looking for improvements to process, and so forth.
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@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
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?
Well, I work for a Microsoft partner, so if my clients decide Microsoft is no longer the best choice they're not going to remain as my client.
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@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
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.I think it's odd to distinguish between the two. By your criteria you wouldn't now employ your own team if they applied for their own position?
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@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
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...
Your business risks are all valid, but this is why when I was running an internal IT department I would encourage my team to learn and explore other potential technologies. If we were running SQL Server, look into other databases. If the servers are all Windows, put a Linux sandbox in. This was all part of learning and developing the team, and keeping their passion for IT. Never stand still.
But the key point here is that this was all part of their job. Learning other technologies was part of their job, for precisely the reason you've mentioned - risk management. And all that learning was done on their work laptops.
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@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
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.
So I should buy a laptop now, even though I don't need one, just in case my employer decided to let me go?
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
So I should buy a laptop now, even though I don't need one, just in case my employer decided to let me go?
No, but that's a weird leap of logic. But it is a risk you should anticipate and calculate.
You'll notice that I said it was people (in this thread, no less) who pointed out that employers providing resources (and employees allowing that) empowers the employer to make it more difficult to leave? That there is a negative that employees often overlook and don't account for when they request or demand that behaviour (or see it as favourable.) There is an emotional reaction to being "given" the use of a laptop or whatever that feels good and makes us often overlook the obvious negatives (they are allowed to control it more, it is part of your total cost of employment, it encourages you to put yourself at more risk in case of being unemployed, etc.)
A smart decision would be, if you truly believed owning your own computer had zero benefit to you, to set aside funds to allow for buying a computer that you never, ever consider part of any other budget so that you can effortlessly buy an appropriate (not emergency) computer without a second thought during a time of financial hardship. And mentally prepare yourself to not act irrationally to the need to do so should that happen.
But employers know that no one does that. They will simply take the "gift" and allow themselves to be more vulnerable and locked in which, in turn, makes them feel less powerful during salary negotiations or whatever.
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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
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...
Your business risks are all valid, but this is why when I was running an internal IT department I would encourage my team to learn and explore other potential technologies. If we were running SQL Server, look into other databases. If the servers are all Windows, put a Linux sandbox in. This was all part of learning and developing the team, and keeping their passion for IT. Never stand still.
But the key point here is that this was all part of their job. Learning other technologies was part of their job, for precisely the reason you've mentioned - risk management. And all that learning was done on their work laptops.
That's awesome, and I appreciate the value. My view, and you can take this either way, is that you can't determine what that scope is going to be necessarily which is why you want people learning all kinds of things over a broad spectrum because what does and doesn't apply is often a surprise.
Like, ten years ago, no one would think that MS SQL Server would be best run on Linux. And yet, here we are today with lower cost and better stability on Linux and the best SQL Server deployments no longer require Windows skills (on the strict DB component.) Not many DBA teams or their support teams anticipated that.
By take it either way... I mean you can then say "learning anything is within work hours scope" or you can say "they should learn on their own time because you can't define the scope." In our case, we let people study anything during work hours (we also let them play with their kids.)
Remember absolutely nothing is being said about what they learn "on their own machine vs work machine" it was about "what they have to learn during work hours vs what they choose to learn at other times that isn't believed to be work related."
