Yesterday’s Detroit Free Press Article titled “Ford CEO Farley reflects on 5 years in the job and what he needs to do next” mentions a “cultural change” mandated by CEO Jim Farley himself. “The new policy [requires] salaried employees to show up four days a week in the office,” the interview reads. “It comes as the company prepares to move leadership, designers and engineers into a new world headquarters building starting later this year. It’s a move Farley has said will improve efficiency and product development.” I don’t know if this will actually markedly improve efficiency and development, but I can tell you: At least one person is seriously upset about it. Seriously.
In what has to be the cleverest bit of trolling I’ve seen in along time, someone with access to Ford Motor Company’s internal meeting-room screens has configured many of them to include the words “F**ck RTO” over top of an image showing CEO Jim Farley with a “NO” symbol over his face (that’s the big circle with a slash made famous by No Smoking campaigns).
Here is one of the hacked screens in question:
This was sent my way by an anonymous Ford employee, whom I asked about how the vibes were within the company in regards to the new mandate. “Upset level varies,” the person told me. “Some people bought homes farther away. Some people had a child, some people got a dog.”
The employee went on: “We were promised that remote work is here to stay and people built their lives around that. An about face has real negative consequences for real people.”
A Reddit post titled “Ford’s Dearborn meeting rooms hacked with anti-RTO image” states that it received the screen image from an employee and that “all panels in the building were affected.” A Redditor named Summoners_Rift says they were “Just told by a friend that Ford Racing and Roush were hit too.”
It seems screens throughout Ford have been changed over. Now that’s dedication.
But I get it! That’s a massive, massive change for employees to now have to live within ~30 miles of their office. I bet folks are having to sell homes, losing time with their families, etc etc. On the other hand, Automakers are facing press to produce, especially in the uncertain modern era where EV mandates come and go and China’s electric car-prowess looms overhead. Not to mention, Ford has spent so much money on its new headquarters; you have to wonder how big of a role that plays in the new policy.
As someone who used to engineer cars for a major automaker, my view is: I think in-person time is deeply valuable for vehicle development, but five or even four days a week is likely not necessary for most employees. Obviously, if you’re running a dyno cell or you’re a technician, you have to be near the hardware. But if I’m sitting in CAD packaging meetings all day, I can do that from home. I recall so many times the vast majority of engineers being on their laptops during meetings, barely paying attention. I bet three days a week would be enough for plenty of engineers, though again, I understand where companies like Ford are coming from. This is a tough situation that involves considerations around real estate, employee productivity, human livelihoods, talent acquisition/retention, and on and on.
Ford didn’t just suddenly make this change — the transition has been, at least on some level, gradual, as Carscoops mentioned earlier this year. From Carscoops:
Ford adopted its current hybrid model in April 2022 and has gradually increased the requirement for employees to work from the office three days a week. By increasing this to four, it believes it can improve performance.
While some employees (like the one I spoke with) may feel they were promised remote work indefinitely, to high-ups at Ford, it was likely always temporary. It’s a really tricky situation, and though I can chuckle at the brazenness of this hack, I want to emphasize that a slash through the CEO above is not funny and could be perceived by some as a threat (though it’s the “No” symbol, so I personally read it as “No Farley”). This, of course, is not in any way funny or cool, and, on a personal level, I’ve always enjoyed chatting with Farley; he seems like a smart and truly enthusiastic car-guy. Put a funny hat on him or something! The slash is not even creative. The hack (which I’m hearing might have affected Ford monitors globally), though, was.
Or they could do what my employer does, which is hire people remotely for years, THEN randomly and suddenly assign them to offices that have nothing to do with their jobs, but they’re still required to show up.
It’s been eye opening after a decade of building your entire day/life around a certain expectation.
It creates family strain. Worse work output. Disdain. Resignations (unless you’re just waiting on your layoff like me). It’s horrible where it’s not needed, and where it does occur, it’s almost always just people doing the same Zoom/Teams meetings, but in an office setting.
Unless you have ~100% of your team in one place, it’s crazy. So I can’t be too mad at Ford here (they seem to fit the criteria of co-location) because I’ve seen how stupid it can get.
Ford will have to make sure that the AI chatbots that will take over lots of the middle management jobs bring their data centers and battery backup with them as they return to office.
I’ll happily admit that my current job can’t be performed 100% from home – in fact, I should be out in the warehouse right now searching for some documents – but I was on a 7 days out/3 days in rotation during the pandemic, and it was heavenly. This was later adjusted to a 1 week out/1 week in rotation, which still wasn’t bad. I was able to work interruption-free at home (aside from phone calls and the occasional meeting), and I could balance my workload to make sure I could accomplish anything I couldn’t do at home during those three days in the office. It also made the noisy coworkers much more tolerable, especially if they were on an opposing schedule.
Strangely, my company seems to have a couple of employees who are 100% remote; they don’t even have a desk or cube in this building. This has never been explained to me.
There’s definitely two sides from my perspective. There are definitely days that it would help to work in physical proximity to coworkers. I think you should trust your managers and employees to know when that is for their role.
From the individual perspective, I love working remotely and the drawbacks in collaboration are offset by no commute, flexibility, quiet, etc. I have a damned nice office at home, a great patio I can work from on nice days, an espresso machine. In the office I’m crammed into a dark room full of people shoulder-to-shoulder with no sunlight, terrible coffee, and nowhere nearby to eat. They can’t fix the commute, but if they want me to hate coming into the office less maybe the office should be nicer. I recently went back to the office and it’s worse than I remembered. I’m now looking for other opportunities.
From the company perspective, you have to keep your people happy. You’re not going to get any collaboration benefit if you can’t attract top talent or your best people leave. A nice office is expensive and will appeal to some people. The flexibility to work from home is free and will appeal to a lot of people as well. You have to know your workforce and find that balance.
The discussion in the comments is just as great as the article itself – you know you’ve hit on something when you can get this much back and forth going
RTO mandates are almost always a means to backdoor layoffs or even better for the company voluntary termination or early retirement.
This has nothing to do with creativity or interpersonal synergy or whatever buzzwords they tend to use to justify it. Ford wants to trim headcount and this is a way to do that. if they don’t trim enough with this move i wouldn’t be surprised if formal layoffs are the next step.
Exactly, they can claim they didn’t lay people off. Those people just chose not to RTO. Then they fill the “office” with the new AI managers and upset all the employees working under them. Gotta love large corporations! Working from home under the panopticon prison that was an insurance company that was a terrible experience I wish no one had to undergo.
We’re doing both at the same time. I’m just waiting out and hoping for the day that things slow down, or they hit their headcount goal, then maybe things will be semi-normal again.
There are real dollars and cents at play in this dramatic exercise in lack of sense. Data has shown repeatedly and consistently that WFH saves money and improves productivity. If Ford’s CEO lacks the ability to act on data, what is he doing as CEO of a major corporation? Shareholders should be livid. RTO in nearly every instance at this point is a sign of weak leadership and a failure of the entire upper management team for not standing up. May Ford’s share price fall to the depths it deserves.
Considering Farley’s penchant for recalls, I’ve been wondering for years now how he is still CEO. Dude is a clown. And not an endearing one like his cousin was.
So are you saying he should be living in a Transit down by the river?
Considering that Farley has openly discussed how they intend to cut their white collar workforce in half through AI, I too would maybe not want to model my entire life around a RTO mandate for someone who, apparently, is very excited to eliminate my office job.
We have similar issues around here on a smaller scale, WFO was offered during the pandemic, the company seemed almost excited to allow us to continue to work from home, especially as a means to recruit new people, as our office is located in the middle of nowhere. There’s basically no real housing available within like, a 20 minute drive. Well, now the company is slowly reeling it in behind the scenes for no other reason than their desire to micromanage and to keep eyes on people. Even worse, upper management hasn’t come out to actual forbid WFH, but I’ve had intel that they’re using it against people regarding their compensation behind the scenes without telling people that their use of WFH is a factor. Shitty, dishonest behavior.
If you can’t trust people to work from home, trust me, those people aren’t getting anything in the office done either. My WFH days (which are sporadic and usually involve me having a midday appointment of some kind) are the most productive days I have. No wasted hour in the car, a lunch break where I can actually do something other than mill about in this remote location, limited distractions from people trying to get me to do their jobs for them.
Exactly. If AI is so awesome, why don’t we use it to start replacing all those high-earning C-suiters and save some serious money?
Always puzzled me that we live in a consumerist economy yet everyone wants to replace everyone with AI. Who exactly do they expect to be customers, when no one is employed?
I imagine the dream is other companies employees, government employees, etc. Or if needed other countries’ employees. Or old people looking to blow through their kids inheritance.
Yes. It’s all going to break down, but it’ll be too late to fix. Our massive consumer culture is like a drug keeping everyone happy and ignoring wage disparities, rising costs, etc. And if AI accellerates that, we’re going to have a new class of Luddite — and it won’t be a little subculture, it’ll be “most people.”
That was my work son. I came into office early (by 7am) to avoid construction on top of usual suburbs -> downtown gridlock. Before I could get my coat off, there he was, coffee cup in hand. He was a brilliant kid who could solve complex equations in his head. Could get his work done in 10% of time it took “normal ppl”. My boss noticed and started to JOIN him.
I could NOT get rid of either of them. If I turned my back to face my screen, they ignored the CUE .. and just talk to each other. WAH … never happened.
We had laptops and identical setup on cellphone. While immediately reachable for those who warranted it .. I could avoid “Chatty Cathys”. Sidenote: They were 2 guys, I’m a woman.
Ask for metrics showing improvement in performance since moving from fully remote to hybrid. Dollars to donuts they don’t have any. RTO is a vibes and power trip thing for execs and real estate owners and has nothing to do with productivity for those who’s jobs don’t require specialized equipment.
I manage a global team within a larger multinational electronics manufacturing company. None of my peers or staff are based in my office location. I have a required 3 days in-office mandate where I burn an hour commuting each way to spend my time in a phone booth taking meetings. Since the exec who put in that mandate is gone, they’re lucky to see me twice a week. About once a quarter there’s a week-long workshop where people come from all over, that’s about the only time office time is useful. That workshop has a set agenda with breakout sessions, etc. And in the end, we all go back to our separate locations and get back to work.
It’s all about real estate. If the buildings aren’t filled, they lose value and so much of this country’s economy is BS real estate value speculation. The big wig execs all sit on each other’s boards, too. You’d think the companies would be thrilled with smaller offices, less utilities, and having that cost shifted to the employee but…. nah.
100% this, if companies all started trying to sell their office buildings it would have crashed the commercial real estate market and have a big ding in the company stocks
Real estate is also why the cubical (and before that the individual office) died. You can cram more people per sq. ft. into an open floor plan than cubicles. Screw all the science that shows that it make productivity and engagement go down. Need to have butts in seats like it’s a damned sporting event. I’m really waiting to just get individual desk/seat combos like in school so we can have rows and rows of workers occupying just a 30″x30″ of floor space each. This is the future of productivity in the RTO workplace: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBZM5GW4/
Sounds familiar, except replace “multinational electronics manufacturing company” with “multinational software development company”. Same RTO mandate with no thought to the side effects on employees.
They pay you. You do what they tell you to do. If you don’t want to, leave.
Or join a union and negotiate.
The especially foolish part of this bootlicking take is that companies that rely on this attitude perform worse. Organizations that are dependent on top-down, authoritarian structures fail to innovate, attract less competent employees, and are less able to deal with an ever-changing environment. Demanding unblinking compliance is a sure sign of incompetent management.
What about ideas, critical thinking and problem solving? I work as little as possible so I can live an actual life. People who do what you suggest are sheeple, or lemmings. Like a brainless cancer cell they consume resources, repreoduce and eventually kill the host.
Lol what an idealist perspective.
“Not to mention, Ford has spent so much money on its new headquarters; you have to wonder how big of a role that plays in the new policy.”
This is no doubt a FAR larger part of the picture than most people realize or that Mr Farley will admit.
Other likely factors: Ford’s business is making cars. Ford employees working from home aren’t driving and wearing out their Ford cars. That’s wasted free (for Ford) advertising and less revenue for the company.
WFH employees also are not having lunch near the office, buying gas, putting wear and tear on the roads, causing traffic, requiring janitorial services, and increasing the value of all commercial property in the area which makes the companies and public departments that service those things upset enough to complain, ESPECIALLY companies that buy and sell real estate.
And of course as many others have pointed out middle managers may feel more secure with employees in cubicles.
“Ford adopted its current hybrid model in April 2022 and has gradually increased the requirement for employees to work from the office three days a week. By increasing this to four, it believes it can improve performance.”
Really? Got any data to show backing that up?
If you’ve already forced your employees into the office three days a week you already should have seen the most gains you’re going to get if that is true. So why not silence your critics with the data you should already have showing you’re right?
If they had data they’d show it and not say ‘We BELIEVE it CAN improve performance’, they’d say ‘being in the office improves performance and we can prove it.’
Exactly.
When my company went to a 3-day required RTO we had a “town hall” with senior execs, and the question was brought up about what kind of tracking/data/analytics they were gathering to see how RTO was impacting the business, what positives/negatives, other takeaways, etc. They flat out said they weren’t doing anything of the sort, and RTO was just how things were going to be now. No analyzing data to see if it’s actually a benefit to the company.
Sounds like a great company…to leave.
I wonder how senior executives get to that position and feel it is earned? They make broad sweeping changes that negatively impact the company based on NO data and they are ok with it. There is a book called the Psychopath Test which shows data that Execs are 4 times more likely to have psychopath tendencies where they can make decisions that hurt people without remorse and they lack the behavioral controls that keep others from harm. I am smart enough to know that correlation is not causation, but damn, these execs all behave like heartless A-holes.
I worked for an industrial company for years and when they allowed work from home, mostly during covid, it was pretty nice. But also working hybrid at a production facility you don’t want to complain too loud when there are people running equipment that have to be there every day. Ford is definitely a production company, having the majority of workers have to be on site, and a privileged few get to work from home can lead to, shall we say, lack of comradery.
There’s already a usual divide between white collar and blue collar, allowing the white collars to go awol, and when an issue comes up that could use their attention and they’re nowhere to be found or have to do a zoom meeting, it can be frustrating for those on the floor.
I’ve said before, individual output can increase with wfh(so can it being taken advantage of), but collaboration suffers. Also, yeah they just built a fancy new headquarters so, kind of need to justify that some.
So people that don’t need to be there should anyway so the people that do don’t have their fee fees hurt? That’s your argument?
As much as we don’t like to admit it, workplaces aren’t democracies, but employers also don’t want to hear complaining, if it costs them nothing to address a complaint, like “the engineers are never around when we have a question and we can’t get a hold of them”, well that’s a quick fix. Of course there’s loss of talent but if the other companies in the related field are all doing the same thing, that’s a little tougher to jump ship.
That’s what company provided smartphones and laptops are for.
“‘F**k RTO’: Someone Hacked The Screens At Ford Headquarters To Protest ‘Return To Office’ Policy”
Good. Now focus that energy on strengthening your union.
And you hang on to that union card in the unemployment line, damning that company for going broke.
Well if you prefer sacrificing your own time and money on the alter of company owned real estate values you go right on ahead. Mr Farley still won’t know or care who you are.
So broke, they paid their CEO $25,000,000 last year.
What flavor leather is that boot you are licking?
Trump Orange.
You’ve got a little something on your nose there…
I telecommuted (not Ford) for 13 years for company of 100K employees. Nothing to do with pandemic. My department (outcome reporting for Marketing and presented to clients) was dispersed across the country. IT mostly India. Customer Service here and offshore (Philippines, etc).
I was responsible for certain tasks. It would be IMMEDIATELY apparent if my role were slacking off. Because of time differences, my days were very early or ran late. When you’re IN OFFICE .. there’s a specific start/stop time signaled by you opening or closing your laptop. Arriving/leaving building. At home, you can NEVER turn it off. Ppl pinging far outside “standard work hours”.
Extreme example: Client-specific website for new program, effective January 1 did NOT load at 12:01 am. New Year’s Eve celebration cut short. 9+ hour meeting with IT India, Marketing, etc. Obviously, NY Day, most in office ppl are enjoying the holiday.
Did I ever put a roast in the oven, wash a load of clothes, leave home midday to grab a coffee or mail a package? Absolutely. BUT .. THEY GOT WAY MORE HOURS OUT OF ME THAN I “STOLE” FROM THEM.