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.
All through COVID we had to be in office because we make things, the whole time bombarded by corporate emails about “Office of the Future ™” for other parts of the company. It was irrationally enraging.
Here we are 5 years later and everyone needs to be in office all the time, but there isn’t enough space for everyone because of “Office of the Future ™” shared desk concept. Of course, all the money spent on it was wasted.
“ I want to emphasize that a slash through the CEO above is not funny and could be perceived by some as a threat”
Boooo, throwing tomatoes ???? ???? ????
It’s important to manage liability in the present context.
To have access to garbage like Farley, you have to protect garbage like Farley. That is how “journalism” works.
FUCK RTO!!!!!!! 😛
Yay glad you posted the uncensored version 😀
RTO-tards need therapy so they can stop feeling insecure and jealous.
They should’ve used the money/effort to downsize and reduce their office space. That would also save them money. Also, the office buildings can be converted to residential. there is a housing shortage in many parts of the country.
If you need to see butts in seats, you’re bad at your job.
Also, the office buildings can be converted to residential. there is a housing shortage in many parts of the country
Ahhh the radical left lunatic has appeared.. Or something stupid.
It’s funny how as both a conservative and an engineer, this makes perfect sense?
I wonder how much ego plays into this? Directors and senior management all want to see all their little busy bees humming away. Otherwise they might stop to think about their little willies.
Could be enough to push people into one of the startups embrace. RTO can be a major talent suck. Alot of times your best creative and intelligent people want nothing to do with an office. Meanwhile the mindless gossip mongers need to be in office and bring down productivity they often get Peter principled to middle management and cause havoc as well.
I much prefer my hybrid schedule because when I go into the office, I have to deal with those exact people. They don’t seem to do anything but just talk all day. I want to get my work done.
“…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.”
That same situation happened in Philly; Comcast owns the two tallest buildings in the city, having completed the 2nd one right before Covid hit. Once the vaccine was available, they implemented RTO, and people were not happy. A friend is in management in accounting, and a lot of his team left – it turns out that many other accounting firms do not require you to be onsite, so the decision was easy.
Comcast was getting a lot of pressure from the city, since they had essentially promised seats in chairs in exchange for tax breaks. With so many people not commuting into the city and spending money on parking, food, beer, and entertainment, the city was taking a tax hit.
Ohhh. That’s why. This is all because the huge companies wanted to not-cheat on taxes, like sports teams.
“It’ll improve the economy because our employees will spend money here, so tax them instead of us!”
We’re implementing a Flexible Work Location as a benefit here, but it’s limited to 20 days a year because of taxes. If you work from home in a different jurisdiction for 21 days or more, then income taxes become an issue, and honestly I think that was a huge part of the reason RTO was immediate here after COVID lockdowns ended. A lot of income tax money got shifted around from one city to another as they all figured out where peoples’ butts were when WFH.
My personal take is that I don’t really care for WFH. For me, there is a positive social component to being in the office and during the lockdown I felt the absence. I get that others like it, and I’m glad there there is a way to offer it here even in some limited capacity for those who want it, but it’s not my first choice.
I say this every time RTOs come up. I work for a global Fortune 500 company with over 70,000 employees. I am 100% remote and there’s not even an office within 400 miles of me. Even though I work with people spread out across the globe and will never meet most of them in person, things get done. They were doing remote work before the pandemic, which helps, but it really shows just how unimportant in-person time is for a wide variety of jobs. Why commute 30+ minutes a day, each way, only to sit in front of a computer and have meetings, all of which could be accomplished on a laptop in your home. Plus, I always wasted so much time at the office. Lunch breaks, casual conversations that stretched on far too long, pointless meetings and “team building” exercises. At least when I’m at home, my down time can involve spending time with my pets, talking to my fiancee if he’s home, or doing some chores.
Not to mention the environmental impact, and wear and tear on my car. I went from driving 15k miles a year down to about 6k, just by working from home. That’s a lot of fuel I’m not burning! Working from home has been the single biggest cut to my personal carbon footprint, and I bet that’s true for a lot of folks. Beyond wasting people’s time, forcing RTO creates an entirely avoidable environmental impact, just because incompetent middle managers cant feel superior unless they can look down over people’s shoulders. Plus commuting time is unpaid, so it’s asking people to give up a decent amount of time (for me about an hour a day) just so someone feels good about butts in seats.
And I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to feel bad for owners of the office real estate that are losing money on this. They’re richer than I’ll ever be and will continue to be regardless of what happens.
To be clear I know there’s plenty of jobs where hybrid or in-person time is required. But I’ve been in advertising/marketing/data analytics for about a decade and every single position I held before this one could have been remote with no drawbacks.
Just goes to show how much wasted real estate there is in this country.
I’m not sure that pointing out why the car company is dumb to enforce RTO by citing how much less you drive by working from home is the flex you’re looking for
Fords gotta justify that new office somehow. Same thing happened to one of my family members when their office got renovated, although they aren’t in the auto industry.
But anywho, as a tail-end millennial engineer in the auto industry who primarily works on CAD, mostly remote is fine for me. Not to dive into too much copium, an overwhelming majority of my work can be achieved without being chained to a desk so I get the frustration.
My flexible work arrangement was rescinded “until next year” which definitely means forever. In our case, leadership does not want to fill vacant positions, so there’s not enough people to keep the lights on if some of us work from home or have condensed schedules. Leadership, of course, is happy to continue to allow themselves flexible work arrangements.
All these companies deserve to lose some good people over these dumb rules.
But they don’t care. They want workers they can control more than they want smart, independent thinkers.
And to be clear, I am not even a huge fan of WFH. I’ve been doing it for years now and I find it very isolating sometimes, but I also see some huge benefits for it. The biggest issue is that these companies were quick to adopt WFH when it was beneficial to them. They’d spout stuff like “our people are our biggest asset” and other BS like that. But now that they think they can squeeze another 1.3% of productivity out of their already over-worked employees, they are quick to abandon any agreements they made in the past.
Of course it doesn’t help that there are countless videos online of stupid fucks showing how they are goofing off when they are supposed to be WFH.