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Corporate culture is formed from a company’s daily practices, traditions, beliefs, and programs. When your corporate culture isn’t being treated as a priority, it’s reflected in employee performance, productivity, and retention.A major contributor to corporate cultural dysfunction is when the executive team concludes their new time-tracking software is a success because the metrics for billiable time, input accuracy and workforce adoption rates are all trending in the right direction.What the data doesn’t reveal?The workforce, informed by supervisors that leadership is closely watching the timecard system rollout metrics, is completely focused on delivering timecards accurately, completely and on time. The energy and attention that customers expect — effort that usually keeps the supply chain running from suppliers to factories to fulfillment and waiting on the doorstep of customers as promised — is instead being spent submitting timecards that generate data the executives want to see.So the leadership sees spreadsheets that show their goals and project objectives all met or exceeded far faster than expected, and declares success. But the workers and customers see it as a complete disaster.The failure to instill a culture where managers consistently remind their staff that a change in process is important — but never more important than serving customers and delivering goods and services — created an environment where the bureaucracy got what it wanted. When that comes at the expense of losing customer loyalty, good will and many consumers going to your competitors in search of the service experience that kept them with you.The disconnect isn’t just operational:Ninety-two percent of CEOs[1] report their organization is empathetic. However, only 50% of employees say their CEO is empathetic.This gap in perspective directly affects employee morale: 81% of employees would be willing to work longer hours if they felt their employer was empathetic.When your employees are unhappy — they feel the work they do is unimportant, unappreciated and without a sense of purpose — the work and the customer experience suffers.Look at these two llists. The companies in each group all have something in common; Group ‘A’ belongs to one end of a spectrum, with Group ‘B’ far, far away on the opposite end of the spectrum. There is no need for me to explain the commonalities among ‘A’ companies and ‘B’ companies, or to reveal which group is on the right track and which group is succeeding despite themselves:Group ‘A’:Warby Parker (Everything)Trader Joe's (Everything)Hulu (Customer Service)Shipt (Target Corp’s home delivery service)American Express (Cardholder Services)GEICO Insurance (Policyholder Claims & Customer Service)The Ritz-Carlton Hotel CompanyGroup ‘B’:Comcast Xfinity (Everything)Walgreens (Everything)Apple Support (Online help & Apple Store Geniuses)FedEx Office Print & Ship Center (Everything)Uber, Lyft, GrubHub and related ‘platforms’ with large workforces yet few employeesCenturyLinkSpirit AirlinesAll providers of Health Insurance in the USAFootnotes[1] Why Empathy Matters In The Workplace

I have not personally “worked from home” although I have worked jobs for years that could have been completely accomplished from home: I worked a miserable call center job for seven years, and another seven years at a commercial insurance company for which my responsibilities was 100% responding to emails from insurance agents.The insurance company did toward the end of my tenure offer “telecommuting” once a week as an experimental trial “with your manager’s approval” but that one day a week excluded Mondays and Fridays and required us to provide the necessary computer equipment, internet access, and phone land lines at home at our cost. Even if I had been willing and able to equip and maintain a home office on my dime, my departmental manager immediately followed up the email announcing the new policy with her own email basically saying “There’s no way you have my approval, so don’t ask.” She later admitted in a departmental meeting that she is an extravert who thrives on interacting with people and she’d be miserable if she didn’t see us every day.My commute at the time was 40 miles a day, 50 minutes a day. At the minimum, working from home would have been a significant amount of gas money back in my pocket and a morning alarm clock going off 30 minutes later each day. Not to mention the wear-and-tear on my car.But while I personally have not “worked from home,” my husband has spent the last couple of years working from home. And he loves it.He didn’t start out that way. David began as a contract employee working for a temp agency at a health insurance company. As an IT worker, he was there to man the health insurance company’s helpdesk, answering the phone from health insurance company employees who need their online accounts unlocked, forgotten passwords reset, etc. He also established new email and online accounts and phone numbers for new hires, and granted appropriate computer security access and pushed needed software to individual desktops.He loved the job. With rare exceptions, it was hands-off; despite being on-site in the corporate headquarters building, he rarely handled any computer hardware or faced a health insurance company client in person; that was the responsibility of Field Support. Field Support were the ones who plugged in the PCs and the printers and wired the phones in actual cubes. David spent his days providing customer service over the phone.The only flyspeck was the other employees in the IT Department he worked with. IT professionals can be a weird bunch, and sometimes that’s cool, and sometimes it’s annoying, and sometimes downright painful. David for the most part tried to keep to himself; rightly or wrongly, David actively avoids conflict and confrontation. So David mostly gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the obnoxious overly-loud music blaring from one employee’s cube, the employee who listened to right-wing news outlets and loudly expressed his extremist views to anyone who would listen, the Bible-thumper who needed spoken to with care because he was so easily offended and who looked for any opportunity to “witness,” the employee who slurped and chewed with his mouth open, the stolen lunches and sodas missing from the departmental refrigerator.But the worst was “Dan.” There’s at least one “Dan” in every office, and if you’re really unlucky, he’s your boss. Dan was not David’s boss, but he pretty consistently behaved like a middle-school bully. And his target was David. Every exchange was a referendum on David’s weight, intelligence, professional competency or education, political or religious views, or sexuality. A homophobe, Dan was pretty persistent in daily accusing David of being in the closet despite David’s wedding ring.Of course, as we all know, ignoring bullies doesn’t stop the behavior. But in a work setting, a solid right hook upside the head is not an option. David appealed to his temp agency supervisor. That supervisor advised that Dan had already forced several employees to terminate their employment but there was nothing to be done; Dan was the health insurance company’s employee. David would need to appeal to Dan’s boss, the department’s manager.So for months, David handled Dan by screaming and crying in frustration every day in the car during his commute home, and bitching to me about it at home. He was miserable, but reluctant to quit. Quitting meant giving up a job he actually liked that paid well, and quitting meant Dan would win; he’d succeed in driving out another employee.David’s temp agency put in a bid to continue their contract with the health insurance company. They lost. Suddenly, all the temp employees working at the health insurance company, including David, were unemployed because IBM won the bid. Those last two weeks before the expiration of the contract were pretty stressful. Until the IBM supervisor arrived on site to advise that IBM was “re-hiring” all the existing temps. David is now a contract employee of IBM. Except for retirement benefits, David is indistinguishable from full IBM employees: he’s subject to the same work policies, receives vacation and health benefits, IBM signs his paycheck.Upon commencement of IBM’s new contract, David’s health insurance company supervisor called each employee in turn to individual meetings to basically reassure everyone that little in the department would change. Except when David arrived, his meeting included his client company supervisor, his supervisor’s supervisor, a Human Resources representative, and one of David’s coworkers, a client company permanent employee I will call “Brian.” David was terrified; he thought he was losing his job despite his high performance evaluation scores.His supervisor started the meeting with, “Brian is telling us you’ve been experiencing some issues with Dan, and he’s worried that you’ll quit and we’ll lose a good employee. Tell us what’s going on?”David confirmed the specific examples Brian related, and added his own. The HR rep was horrified. Brian stated flat-out that several former employees had left because of Dan. And that’s when their supervisor slapped his hands on the desk, stating, “This stops now. Dan has already been disciplined for this before. IBM doesn’t play. If they get wind of this, we’re in for a lawsuit.”The ultimate result was that Dan was given his second strike out of three and advised he was risking termination. Dan’s occasional partner-in-crime was a temp employee who was terminated immediately. And to separate him from Dan, David was offered and promoted to his current work-at-home position. For the two weeks it took to process the promotion and ship IBM-provided home office equipment to the house, Dan was on his best behavior.The benefits of working from home have been astronomical. It meant we still had a job when circumstances forced us to move and we were able to choose to relocate 700 miles to Florida. The fact that David’s supervisor didn’t care where David logged in from at 7:30am sealed the deal and we contacted a Florida real estate agent. We bought a dream home in a Florida beach town where we are deliriously happy and we were only able to do that because David’s work-from-home job transferred to our new address. David mailed a heartfelt thank-you letter to Brian, telling him we are living the dream in Florida only because Brian spoke up about Dan.David’s daily commute is now the thirty feet from one bedroom to the next, and we have hundreds in gasoline money every month we’re no longer spending. David’s car rarely moves and it’s now insured at a lower rate as a pleasure vehicle.He sleeps in until just before he needs to log in, and he works mostly in his PJs, meaning I’m not spending the time and money on his laundry. We’re no longer spending the money on office-appropriate dress clothes: no more new button-downs, neckties, dress loafers. David lives in his tee shirts and ratty beach shorts.He drinks coffee all day versus $2 in an office building cafeteria on his break, and lunch is prepared in our kitchen; no more fast food expenses or packing lunch at the crack of dawn and washing out lunch boxes. In fact, for the most part he eats and drinks on his schedule and since he usually eats while answering emails, he ends up spending his “official” log-out-for-lunch lunch hour taking a nap with our cat.David’s monthly haircut expenses have been mostly eliminated and for the first time in his life he has the rockstar long hair he’s always wanted. He gets lazy about shaving because he can, so a lot less money spent on expensive blades.But the best part is that now he’s working a job he loves without dealing with the interpersonal bullshit that comes with working in a cube farm. No annoying music, no body odor, no disgusting table manners and personal habits, no inappropriate jokes, dull conversations, gossip, or office politics. Almost all communication is by email, and is usually no-bullshit work-related. David is “buddies” with one team member and regularly exchanges friendly emails and phone calls with a fellow IBM employee who works from home in North Carolina. The team conducts roughly monthly meetings by conference call. His IBM supervisor is pretty hands-off: no micromanaging bullshit and communication by email on the rare occasion he needs to outside the monthly conference call. Timecards, payroll, and productivity are all recorded by the computer.As far as I as an outsider can tell, the worst part of David’s working from home is that sick-time usage is minimized. You’ve got to be at death’s door if you’re too sick to work from home and need to take sick time. On the other hand, if he needs to take two hours to visit the dentist, he just logs out and makes the time up later by working through lunch or logging out at 5pm instead of 4pm. Damn, I’ve got a toothache, no nap tomorrow!In fact, that timecard policy has been the source of some amusement. One of David’s team members is a woman who has already demonstrated that she isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. She works out of her home in Illinois. Their manager had initiated a conference call to inform everyone that the health insurance company had declared a snow day at corporate headquarters and with the client company shut down for the day, this was the team’s opportunity to get caught up on the backlogged service tickets. Little Miss Illinois, who again, works from home, wanted to know if she could log off for the day because it snowed in Illinois too. That initiated quite an amusing email chain between David and his North Carolina teammate.With the Coronavirus pandemic, Corporate America was forced to send employees to work from home. David’s client health insurance company did too. While other people lost their jobs, David and his teammates were swamped with service tickets trying to set up all these home offices at once. And like much of Corporate America, many of those health insurance employees will never return to the corporate headquarters building.Corporate America has been reluctant to embrace telecommuting. There are too many middle managers whose jobs are mostly micromanaging and generating statistical reports and enforcing productivity goals, quality control, and office policies. Coronavirus proved to Corporate America that computer timecards and records can enforce attendance and productivity policies just as well or better than middle management. Working with a computer he cannot argue with, David’s productivity is higher than ever.Corporate America cited the expense. But setting up employees to work from home permanently just means they’re buying equipment for bedrooms instead of cube farms. And they are realizing that empty cube farms means they no longer need to occupy office buildings. No more overpriced commercial rent, utilities, insurance. No more janitorial services or building or elevator maintenance. Etc, etc, etc. Employees working from home is only expensive if companies are maintaining home and office workspaces.And, oops, companies can probably save money by letting go those now-unnecessary middle managers, who in our experience apparently need to include “Asshole” on their resumes to qualify for the job.Oh, and how about saving the money by eliminating the fake celebrations committees? No more money spent pretending Corporate gives a shit by throwing Thanksgiving lunches, Christmas galas, Halloween parties. No more money spent on Christmas trees in the break room and paper skeletons hanging on the restroom doors. Just divy those expenses up and send my Christmas bonus check. Oh, you don’t offer bonus checks? Then give the money to your starving stockholders and put an electronic picture of a turkey on my email signature.It’s my belief that working from home benefits both the company and the employee, and that Coronavirus proved to Corporate America that despite their concerns, it can work. It has worked, and it’s working now. That’s why so many companies are now telling employees that if they want to, they can now work from home forever. It’s the future.Oh, and Dan? He opened his mouth one too many times and got his third strike; he’s out.