SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?
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@Jimmy9008 said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
The laptop trackpad and keyboard, wear and tear. Components have a lifespan and none of that lifespan should go to the employer on a device I own.
They all have lifespans greater than their usable lives. If you want to talk about BS arguments, this is the very definition.
You might as well argue that your employer needs to provide the windows that the sunlight is coming through because there is wear and tear from the sunlight.
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@Jimmy9008 said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
I have been WFH for a long time and feel passionately that if I’m doing work, the it’s on something work provided. The only time I would consider using my own hardware would be if the work hardware fails and I am waiting for the hardware to be fixed.
Sure, I get that. But your logic as to why... because it costs you nothing but they should never benefit from anything you have no matter how little that would cost you, is the issue.
And if work stuff fails and you'd use your own stuff temporarily... what's the change in logic there? I love the thought, but I don't understand why that would provide an exception to your "no way will they benefit from something I have" mentality. What makes it unacceptable normally, but acceptable then? Feels like a flaw in the logic. If the employer must supply everything no matter what, then it's no matter what. If it should be "what makes logical sense and benefits both parties most" then it would be the other. This feels like an untenable middle ground where the hard line doesn't make sense and the common good doesn't make sense.
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@Jimmy9008 said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
I am reacting to the video and discussions on this page. My example provides an example scenario which could happen. I own a deceive, it is my device, and I decide to give my device to somebody else. I no longer have it. Therefore, I have no device to work on. This is one reason why it is entirely expected by myself and many others that work must provide devices. You expect me to be able to work, then provide the tools to do so.
This is a fine example, but isn't really relevant in your "no wear and tear hard line" position. If the point is you want to buy and sell, change or share, that's a great position and I think a great discussion... does using your own machine lock you into always using your own machine? And the answer is... well it depends, I'm sure.
But if you are going to take the hard line of "I'll never allow the employer to benefit" then this really is pointless as the fact that you have or don't have the equipment doesn't matter because even if you have it and there's no reason not to use it for work, you won't do so.
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@Jimmy9008 said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
You expect me to be able to work, then provide the tools to do so.
So again I'll keep asking the same question... where do you draw this "hard line"? You are making the computer a hard line, but why not the INternet, the chair, the desk, the house? All of them are things you'd expect functional IT people to own regardless of anything else (work provided equipment or not.) When you start drawing hard lines (work must provide the equipment) then I have to ask... which equipment do you include and which do you not include because to me and others, there's no definition here. All of it is stuff you would be expected to already have, all things people normally use freely for work, all things that have nominal wear and tear added by using during work, all things you need if looking for your next job, but one of them, but only one, is singled out as "work HAS to provide it." Why that one, and what logic makes that one so adamant and the others ignored?
What I'm looking for is a consistency to the reason. If there is going to be a general rule (anything I use for work, work must provide) then that rule should apply. But it seems you have a hard and fast rule that almost never applies.
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Keep in mind the ENTIRE concept of "work from home" is that instead of making you go into an office, sit in a company supplied space, use company supplied equipment, and you have to provide the commute, the ability to travel, your extra time to get there that you exchange the use of your house and electric and internet (and often computer or whatever) to gain huge amounts of benefits while your employer benefits from having to provide less. Everyone wins because you act as a team, working towards a common good and both sides should benefit.
If you don't feel that the employer should benefit from that, and are willing to give up those benefits to spite them, then the employer can achieve the same goals more cheaply in an office building in most cases. If I have to pay for electric, Internet, computers, heating, cooling, desks, chairs, etc. I can do that much more effectively where there is security, monitoring, shared spaces, etc.
Working from home is a really obvious benefit that employers can provide. Allowing the "costs you nothing" use of your home resources is a trivial exchange for getting all those benefits for yourself.
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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?
