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Dell Makes Return-To-Office Push With VPN, Badge Tracking (arstechnica.com) 108

Dell is making sure its employees follow the company's updated return-to-office policy through a series of new tracking techniques. According to The Register, Dell will track employees' badge swipes and VPN connections and include a color-coded attendance grading system that summarizes employee presence.

"In the latest Jeff Clarke return-to-grade-school initiative, HR will be keeping an attendance report card on employees, grading them at four levels based on how well they meet the goal of being in the office 39 days a quarter," a source familiar with Dell told The Register, referring to the IT giant's chief operating officer. "Employees who do not meet the attendance requirement will have their status escalated up the ladder to Jeff Clarke, who apparently believes that being a hall monitor trumps growing revenue." From the report: Starting next Monday, May 13, the enterprise hardware slinger plans to make weekly site visit data from its badge tracking available to employees through the corporation's human capital management software and to give them color-coded ratings that summarize their status. Those ratings are: Blue flag indicates "consistent onsite presence"; Green flag indicates "regular onsite presence"; Yellow flag indicates "some onsite presence"; Red flag indicates "limited onsite presence".

A second Dell source explained managers aren't on the same page about the consequences of the color tiers, with some bosses suggesting employees want to remain Blue at all times and others indicating there's more leeway and they could put up with a few red flags. "It's a shit show here," we're told. [...] "Dell is tracking badge-ins and VPN connections to ensure employees are onsite when they claim they are (to deter 'coffee badging' or scanning your badge then going immediately home)," a third source told us. "This is likely in response to the official numbers about how many of our staff members chose to remain remote after the RTO mandate." [...]

We're told that the goal of the worker tracking appears to be workforce attrition. "The problem is the market is soft right now for tech," our second source, pointing to recent AWS job cuts. "Everyone is laying off." This person anticipates further Dell layoffs over the summer, though no dates have been set. Our third source indicated that the onsite tracking policy seems unusually aggressive for Dell. "Even pre-pandemic, they never pushed or pressured folks to be in the office," this person said. "A common phrase used to be 'Work happens where you make it,' with the office often being a ghost town multiple times a week, or after lunch, or pre-holidays." Dell in February reported fiscal year 2024 revenue of $88.4 billion, down 14 percent from 2023, and profits of $3.2 billion.

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Dell Makes Return-To-Office Push With VPN, Badge Tracking

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  • Jeff Clarke (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Man On Pink Corner ( 1089867 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @09:10PM (#64458371)

    Now there's a name I haven't heard for a LONG time, as a former Dell employee. He must have, what, a two-digit badge number?

    Retire already, Jeff. The world has moved on.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Now there's a name I haven't heard for a LONG time, as a former Dell employee. He must have, what, a two-digit badge number?

      Retire already, Jeff. The world has moved on.

      Hold on a minute. Let’s ensure he stays in the spotlight long enough for the world to see the cloud of commuter pollution following him to the next save-the-planet banquet. I’d like to ensure those carbon taxes hit hard on the hypocrites.

    • He's a crony, most of their exec staff are dumber than dried shit.

      Using RTO to layoff seems like a game they get up to, it's also no doubt part of the new tax deal they just landed.

    • by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Now there's a name I haven't heard for a LONG time

      "Hello, Old Friend"?

    • As an ex Dell guy myself... fuck Jeff Clarke.

      I got "Workforce Reduction"-ed in 2020 right in the heart of the pandemic. It wasn't a surprise given that the writing was already on the wall that the EMC bros were basically running the show on the pre-sales side after the "merger". The office we had in St. Louis was a shit show of EMC bros who were all about the frequent meetings and seeing people at the office every day... while most of the people actually doing good numbers were the ex Dell guys who until th

  • The next phase (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Randseed ( 132501 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @09:18PM (#64458377)
    The next phase, of course, is to institute badge checking for the bathroom so they can monitor the amount of productivity supposedly lost while the employee is working out that dodgy breakfast burrito they got from the cafeteria. Seriously, if the work gets done, who cares?
    • Old and out-of-touch managers.

      It's hard for the MBA set to justify their presence if they can't spend 8 hours a day walking around and "inspiring" people.
    • if the work gets done, who cares?

      Productivity is notoriously difficult to measure for creative and collaborative jobs.

      I'm not saying WFH is better or worse, but the idea of an easily available numerical score of each employee's "work done" is nonsense.

      • If true, that means any claims about needing to go back to the office to improve productivity are suspect at best.

        • If true, that means any claims about needing to go back to the office to improve productivity are suspect at best.

          Not necessarily. Aggregate productivity can be measured better than individual productivity.

          It is easier to see that a team is failing than to see which individuals are responsible.

          If a serendipitous conversation while microwaving a burrito in the snack room fails to happen, whose fault is it?

          • If the team productivity can be measured, and the team used to all be in the office and now isn't, then it will be easy to tell if it's working. Though I'm skeptical of the claim that team productivity is measurable and individual productivity is not.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            The manager that didn't set up an employees only chat roulette server?

      • So... let's measure it by the "time of ass in a chair" metric?

        Yeah, that's a good one. You don't even need good developers for that, the bum at the street corner can keep that chair from floating off into space just as good as any senior dev, just for cheaper!

    • The next phase, of course, is to institute badge checking for the bathroom so they can monitor the amount of productivity supposedly lost while the employee is working out that dodgy breakfast burrito they got from the cafeteria.

      That's old-school thinking. What they really should do is add Bluetooth LE to the badges, require people have their badge with them at all times, and do frequent spot checks to enforce the policy. Scatter a liberal number of beacons around the office - including in the bathrooms - and viola! It's a futuristic management dystopia!

  • This will surely help employee morale.

  • by chaffed ( 672859 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @09:20PM (#64458383) Homepage

    Years ago I tested the badge swipe data for my enterprise to see if it was good enough to automate attendance, it was not. They had me look at other methods, IP addressing, application usage, and web usage. All had their pitfalls that would hurt employees. I talked them out of it.

    I could not talk them out of tracking attendance. They landed on having my team build an attendance tracking application where managers reported their team's attendance. Even this is fraught with human error.

    The concept of managing to deadlines, deliverables and KPIs fell on def ears. Butts in seats is the metric they wanted.

    It's executive and senior managers covering up their inability to deliver based on actual deliverables.

    • by LondoMollari ( 172563 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @09:34PM (#64458421) Homepage

      Replying only to your technicals, I don’t know how it’s possible to have inaccurate badging data when a badge is needed to open any outside door and many interior doors, combined with a strict “no tailgating” policy. Employees already know tailgating isn’t allowed so if someone doesn’t get scanned they are breaking the rules.

      Nothing against WFH here - it’s just that I don’t see how badging data to detect mere presence could be so inaccurate. Using it for punch-in and out times would be another story.

      • by chaffed ( 672859 )

        Oh tailgating is rampant. Confirmed for myself and watching video.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Congratulations, you work with a bunch of cheaters who care more about evading responsibility and saving a second of their time than about the company's security.

          • Congratulations, you work with a bunch of cheaters who care more about evading responsibility and saving a second of their time than about the company's security.

            He works with human beings. If you can assemble a team of perfect human beings then my hat is off to you, but the rest of us have to work with what we have.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            Or they were raised in a polite world where you are expected to hold the door if you know someone is right behind you, not just walk through and let it close like an animal. The last thing the world needs is more policies training people to have main character syndrome.

            • The person holding the door open should now better. The person behind should thank them and badge in.
              • This seems like an easy fix, you don't badge in, you don't get paid. Crazy idea but you would then have everyone badging in.

                • That's basically what they are saying here. From a payroll standpoint, I'm not qualified to comment. From a security standpoint, this doesn't really help. People would badge in every morning but not necessarily after lunch and this. If I were trying to infiltrate the building, I would tailgate as people came back from lunch. There needs to be a penalty for anybody who lets someone tailgate behind them. That's unfortunately expensive to do because, in order to be effective, you have to have enforcement
                  • by sjames ( 1099 )

                    The last thing you want is for non-security personnel to enforce no tailgating, especially with people they don't recognize. It's a huge liability hazard, either from "over zealous" enforcement or a determined tailgater. Even worse if there is an actual penalty for allowing tailgating.

                    If that's a security problem, hiring security is a much better bet.

                    • The person who sees the tailgating doesn't have to intervene, they could simply call security when they get to their desk.
      • by havana9 ( 101033 )
        They could measure attendance using punch-in and punch-out times could be feasible to measure attendance, but I think it also make wage thieving difficult, because any overtime will become apparent.
        • These are likely to be 'exempt' category salaried workers, so you don't need to fudge the numbers to not pay overtime; but it probably is the case that(along with their association with blue collar wage labor) management isn't really keen on the very obvious, very overt, "on clock/off clock" situation that timeclocks embody.

          They are considered the lesser evil when the objective is keeping manual labor and service sector proles you suspect of being shirkers in line; but they aren't really on-message when
          • So what you are saying is the super smart people are easier to manipulate if you give them a pretense of trust regarding attendance?

            No need to badge in, your completed work shows your attendance. By the way, we're behind and need you to stay late "For the team". I think I'd rather just be hourly and get paid then taken advantage of.

            Then again, I know plenty of people that earn more per year but make less per hour then me, so maybe it's all what you want out of life. I kind of feel people that are working 60

      • Great idea. Especially if you have these wonderful turnstile systems that take like half a minute to let anyone pass because they have to make sure that it's only you and not someone tailgating with you.

        If you go for lunch with your team, expect to spend at least half of your break getting out and back in. Yeah, that sure improves teambuilding. But the far bigger problem is that all your investments in the surrounding restaurants, i.e. why you tried to force your people back into office because they were la

        • Not being in a corporate setting myself, whats up with "lunch" being the team building time? Lunch is MY time. If I want to go sit in my car, eat a sandwich and laugh at cat videos, it shouldn't make a difference to anyone and will definitely give me time to actually relax. Lunch is my time to get away from my coworkers. You want team building, that's on the company dime. It's their team after all.

      • Replying only to your technicals, I don’t know how it’s possible to have inaccurate badging data when a badge is needed to open any outside door and many interior doors

        It just depends on how things are set up and whether or not management wants to introduce additional hurdles for employees. We work in a multi-tenant building and have space on multiple floors, some of which are mixed tenant.

        People are constantly moving between floors and holding doors for people. On top of that, the floor where we have control of the entire space is open access through a reception area and, also happens to be where the majority of our employees work.

        The building owns the security logs and

      • Replying only to your technicals, I don’t know how it’s possible to have inaccurate badging data when a badge is needed to open any outside door and many interior doors, combined with a strict “no tailgating” policy.

        Because a badge data doesn't reflect the reason a person isn't in the office.

        You have badge data that indicates someone was in the office X days, or Y days. Did you correlate that against their leave entitlement? Did you check with line managers about specific exceptions? Was the employee on the clock but at a conference? Did they go address a customer on site? Were they on jury duty? Or maybe just sick?

        For many full time employees being in the office doesn't necessarily mean stepping into that particular d

    • these are stealth layoffs. Butts in seats isn't the metric, getting headcount down w/o paying unemployment & severance is.
      • by khchung ( 462899 )

        these are stealth layoffs. Butts in seats isn't the metric, getting headcount down w/o paying unemployment & severance is.

        Exactly, the real KPI they are looking at is "number of people resigned each month", but they cannot say it out loud.

      • That's the worst way of getting rid of people.

        Tell me, who do you think will grin and bear it and who will just give you the finger and tell you to stick it: The dud who knows that he has to sit it out because he has nothing to show for, didn't improve his skills since highschool and only works as much as he absolutely has to to not get fired, or the go-getter with a lot of projects to show off, a github full of his private projects, enough certificates from various trainings to cover more walls than his ap

        • So what's the problem? Who cares if Dell wants to shit themselves. As you said, people that work hard will just move on and probably be happier for it. This should be the push people need. The people that can't be bothered deserve what they get.

      • Good thing these smart, capable employees can just go get a better job if they are so unhappy, right? They have real skills that surely are desired else where, correct?

        If a company decides to enshitify itself, then it's time to leave. I'm actually in the process of doing this myself. I've gone back to school, am learning some new skills and making myself more marketable so I can change industries. My company use to be a good job but that ship has sailed. Whining about it won't help so I'm bettering myself t

    • by sd4f ( 1891894 )

      The concept of managing to deadlines, deliverables and KPIs fell on def ears. Butts in seats is the metric they wanted.

      It's executive and senior managers covering up their inability to deliver based on actual deliverables.

      I have a suspicion that intertwined in this with public companies, which is odd that Dell is making this push, but any company with large investment capital as shareholders, I think that may be a source of the push for people to return to the office. Reason for this is because a lot of these investment funds also have a lot of money tied into real estate, most probably office space, possibly a large piece of the pie, so to speak.

      So coming along and demanding that the boards of businesses they've invested in

    • The concept of managing to deadlines, deliverables and KPIs fell on def ears. Butts in seats is the metric they wanted.

      It's executive and senior managers covering up their inability to deliver based on actual deliverables.

      And after executives demand that “butts in seats” metrics is exactly what they’re going to use to manage deadlines and deliverables, and then that system spits out the fact that employees butts were in fact in those seats 98% of the time, what exactly is the excuse-response from an inept executive and/or senior manager when they are unable to deliver on deliverables that only require 90% or higher butt-in-seat stats?

      Seems when you simplify and break down “performance” to that l

    • by Targon ( 17348 )
      That is where tracking the attendance of those managers needs to be done with the results broadcast across the company once those managers are shown to be not working nearly as much as the rest of the employees do.
    • Years ago I tested the badge swipe data for my enterprise to see if it was good enough to automate attendance, it was not.

      I have experience working in US federal office buildings that required a badge both to access a building and also to access *anything* online/internally. The badge was also a PIV card [wikipedia.org] to slide into the government assign notebook PC. Can't work without it.

      One building where I worked had an expensive security gate requiring a person to badge out, and made it virtually impossible for tailgating to occur while exiting the building, plus there were armed guards, (plus metal screening to enter the building). In m

  • seem to think that hard work will earn more money. They're the managers who can't give employees valued labor.
  • Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @09:47PM (#64458447)
    they're just trying to do stealth layoffs. The tech companies are colluding to bring us to heel. And we're too dumb to use collective bargaining to stop it.

    I blame stupid end users. We here in IT get a *massive* big head because we talk to idiot end users all day. We think we're fucking geniuses because of it. So we think we can somehow negotiate with a multi-billion dollar corporation run by ivy league grads trained at Goldman Sach's and Mckinsey consulting. Literal members of the ruling class. Because Karen in accounting doesn't know how to change her password on the network....
    • You're right, but these companies are also stupid. They think they can get away with this stuff, without affecting morale. Or they don't care. Either way, stupid. They'll be getting way less work for their money.

      • Not stupid, they know there's a morale hit. They know there's more money in people quitting vs having to pay severances.

        I'm not a big IT Union guy we make very good money comparatively, but these are the type of large scale actions that push towards that.
        • by sinij ( 911942 )
          Unions regularly get bought-off, just look at DECADES of corruption at UWA. [npr.org].
          • Wages were still substantially higher with the unions. And the corruption from the unions came almost entirely from their ties to the mafia which existed primarily because they need it muscle to defend themselves against violent attacks from upper management. We can have unions without corruption because they will be without the mafia and all it takes is the public not turning a blind eye when strike breakers come in with guns and clubs and start beating and shooting working Americans.

            It really is that
        • Yes, they know there's a morale hit, and that they'll save money. It's still stupid. Specifically, it's stupide because they are trading a tiny short-term win for a huge long-term loss. With those kinds of tactics, many of the best people are the ones to leave first, because they have options. The people who are doing just enough to get by, to keep from getting fired, those are the ones that hang around, and the company winds up with a huge percentage of incompetent people.

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          OTOH, you can quiet quit or just ignore the policy and force HR to either pay severance or run around collecting paperwork to fire for cause. If the latter, look out for the lawsuit alleging (probably factually) that the whole thing is a constructive layoff.

          • I like this approach. Make them fire you instead of doing them the favor of leaving. That or just find a new job and leave them in the lurch.

        • Having spent a long time with a union shop, I can appreciate that I have a really nice compensation package but I also work with a lot of dead weight that should definitely be let go. Of course, a lot of the dead weight hasn't put the years in and don't make enough to care. Basically, the union got weak and now just seems like they are buddy buddy with the corporation to keep themselves employed with cush jobs instead of actually pushing for better compensation for the workers.

          It's really hard to say what's

          • Entirely fair. Systems built and tun by humans are always fallible. Much HOAs and governments...you get out based on what you're willing to invest. But it takes time and investment, which many of us (including me) fail to do.
      • People think they're not replaceable. There is a very very very very tiny group of people who are not replaceable. But everybody thinks they're in that group. If you're not doing cutting edge mathematics or engineering you are replaceable. And the majority of those people are working in public universities as professors. There is then an even smaller handful of people who work in the private sector doing that kind of work. And you will not last forever. You will have a specialty and they will come a time wh
        • I don't disagree with you. Everybody is replaceable. But, not at zero cost to the company. The hiring process alone costs a company from $4K-$20K. https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/... [indeed.com]. Then there is training and onboarding costs.

          My point was not to suggest that these people they lose are somehow "irreplaceable." Just that it's not financially smart to alienate employees to the point that they decide to leave.

    • Because Karen in accounting doesn't know how to change her password on the network....

      Yeah. Ironically enough it IS often because Karen in accounting can’t manage to remember the last seven times you told her the 2-step process to change her password. A process you posted on the wall a foot away from the phone she’s calling you on, to ask how to change it again.

      We’re not less-than-humble and demand a premium because we think we’re so much smarter. It’s more often because we’re having to perform in a very technically complex job (server farms, virtualiza

      • An unenlightened attitude. If people are calling the helpdesk often enough for it to be a genuine hassle, the process is the problem. IT is supposed to work for the company, not vice versa.

        Forcing people to change their passwords every so often, for example, is not only considered poor security practice at this point, but is guaranteed to cause grief for IT when the user has to be reminded constantly to connect via VPN first. I have managed to desynchronize my Windows and company SSO passwords a couple o

        • An unenlightened attitude. If people are calling the helpdesk often enough for it to be a genuine hassle, the process is the problem. IT is supposed to work for the company, not vice versa.

          I wouldn’t exactly call 30 years of experience in the field, “unenlightened”. Quite the opposite. And thank you for confirming why IT is often forced to enact password changes. 30% of the company would have the same idiot Password1, which would naturally be synchronized to their entire life as well, ripe for the personal and corporate hacking. I remember a time long ago when the CEO himself did not want a password. As in blank. Naturally this did wonders at the time for a common-sens

          • Whatever. Take it up with NIST [nist.gov].

            • Whatever. Take it up with NIST [nist.gov].

              Ugh. Don’t remind me of years of fighting against users who despise security mandates and fail to see how they forced them to become mandatory.

              And remember NIST was the one selling you on the concept of mandatory password changes before. Best to not assume they’re perfect. Yesterday, or today.

    • they're just trying to do stealth layoffs.

      Don't pretend dumb managers who manage by bumbs in seats are playing some 4 dimensional chess moves here. The reality is a *lot* of companies are doing this and the overwhelming majority are not even remotely in the layoff territory.

      When did Slashdot stop acknowledging that bad managers exist? At DELL of all places!

  • As an adult, attendance monitoring can suck it. Why would someone want to work at a place where this color-coded silliness goes on? Have some respect for yourself and take your talents elsewhere.
    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Hack the PA system to play the "Romper Room" theme on a loop when employees are coming in.

    • Have some respect for yourself and take your talents elsewhere.

      Dell has been shedding workers for years. They've dumped their work with VMWare, dumped Boomi (platform as a service), dumped Pivotal (cloud computing), and they've cancelled a ton of smaller projects.

      Clicky [macrotrends.net]. Starting 2020: 165,000 employees. 2021: 158,000. 2022 mass layoffs, down to 133,000 employees. Another 13,000 in two major layoffs in 2023 plus employees leaving the obviously-sinking ship they started 2024 with 120,000 workers.

      From the same link, they were about 60B in debt and sold off profitabl

    • This is funny to me because I see the time clock as a tool for more personal empowerment. You want me to work? I'll do that when I'm GETTING PAID! Oh, it's after I'm clocked out, either I clock back in or you can wait until tomorrow. Sounds great to me.

      My ex wife use to constantly be doing little extra bullshit for her work despite not being salary. I always wondered why she put up with that shit when there was practically zero possibility in her getting fired while also zero possibility of a bonus. She was

  • So they expect you to disconnect your VPN when you go in to work? When I was at Dell, my VPN ran 24/7, allowing me to connect back to my home system when I was at work in case I needed a file I had left at home. Yeah, I suppose they could have a problem with badge data. I know one employee who cloned their badge, so in theory, you could clone cards and have one friend badge in a whole bunch of people. I was laid off at the start of February, before the badge tracking became real, so I don't know what th

    • I have no idea what Dell specifically is doing; but normally when always-on VPN is either allowed or mandatory it's configured so that either the VPN client detects whether it is inside or outside the network and acts accordingly; or so that whatever endpoint it is set to point to resolves differently if you are on public DNS than it does when you are on internal DNS.

      Not something you'd bother with for attendance tracking; just because it's perverse for someone on the LAN to bounce out to the public faci
      • by crow ( 16139 )

        What you describe is what would happen if I were running VPN on a laptop that I took with me to work, not if I were running VPN on a separate system that I left at home, which was what I did. (I had two company-issued laptops, but the reasons why aren't relevant here.)

  • My company been counting badge swipes and having color coded spreadsheets for a year now. Why is this news?

    I figured something along those lines have been done everywhere before my company did, along with the push for people to come into office

  • As an incentive, if you confirm how many times you went to the toilet each week with a written checklist, we will award two bonus points. Employees with enough bonus points get a reward. Employees with no toilet bonus points in 3 months will become ex-employees.

  • I wonder why (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So I had been working day and night, from the office and from home, getting poor sleep for months. Logging in at midnight, 1 and 5 in the morning and beeping working regular hours on top of that. All because I had to keep some systems running with a complete company wide breakdown. No possibility of getting a good nights sleep, and I need now that I passed 50.
    Then came the time last week for the salary adjustment. And I got less than 1% because I was working too much from home, not engaged enough in my work

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 )

      This is the moment when I stand in front of my boss' boss and ask "Ok, so lemme get this straight: Someone who wastes his nights keeping the company's plates spinning is a slacker, but someone who comes to the office to spend his time at the water cooler chatting about last nights football game, that's the company darling?

      Just fucking asking because I know what the company really wants me to do. I am not sure, but if the company needs me to, I am very sure I, too, can be a useless slacker!"

      And yes, that fuc

  • Under the benevolent control of Elon, Dell will soon mandate that employees get neural implants. This will insure that during office hours employees will spend 100% of their time, and 100% of their mental effort, thinking abut their work. Effort less then 100% will be noted on the company wide monitoring system, which just exists to help employees do the best job possible.

    In the unfortunate circumstance an employee falls short, Dell may be forced to let them go. Due to the mandatory NDA, this will require

  • That it is stupid and offensive, that it causes much more unhappiness among good employees than it cures anything for bad, has also been true all along.
  • that is the most corpspeak phrase in recent memory

  • If the company's top priority is warming chairs and justifying poorly-thought-out commercial real-estate purchases, then it must be a pretty terrible place to work.

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