‘Don’t Mess With Us’: WebMD Parent Company Demands Return to Office in Bizarre Video::“I’ve seen better acting by hostages in direct to DVD movies,” one anonymous worker wrote about the video.
I’m so tired of businesses claiming that the only way for a company to be successful is if everyone is in person for the dear dear meetings. We all know exactly what this is about. 1. It’s more dofficult to micromanage employees when a manger can’t constantly observe them, and 2. All the giant real estate investments companies have made is now coming due and they cant fill up their buildings fast enough to get those tax breaks. Why the hell else are they “tracking” people in the office. Meanwhile senior leadership can come and go whenever they see fit. It’s control. Plain and simple.
WebMD is owned by Internet Brands, which is owned by KKR, an investment group with $64 billion in real estate assets. This has fuck all to do with productivity or middle management.
Fuckin kkr. The ones who got Toys R Us to go bankrupt just to make a buck. They also purchased the company i worked for then sold it to another company which resulted in big layoffs some years back. They can eat shit and die.
I miss Toys R Us
Well, good news—Macy’s has brought them back.
We still have them in Canada!
There are company’s where their whole business strategy is to get their employees on the board of a struggling company with the plan to enact policies that seem like they will help but just dig the hole deeper. Until they can start selling off assets, move to bankruptcy, then sail away with golden parachutes to do it all again.
It’s really just “we need people so that our real estate investments don’t tank”, I’m rooting for their shit to tank, fuck the rich.
My company had a badge in/badge out procedure, badge out was new after covid. No one actually badged out. They have since installed security guards at all exits and they will chase you out the door if you forget to badge out.
All the giant real estate investments companies have made is now coming due and they cant fill up their buildings fast enough to get those tax breaks
What are these tax breaks for filling up buildings?
They don’t exist. This made up tale about commercial real estate driving RTO policies has been around since early 2021 when things started opening back up on larger scales. It’s a fiction that just won’t die.
Because it’s not fiction. City leaders and even Congress, at the behest of lobbyists, have clearly urged RTO as a cure to real estate woes.
US Real Estate Firms Urge Federal Government To Bring Workers Back to the Office
Can you back that up with any evidence whatsoever?
Evidence, that something doesn’t exist?
Here: …
You can also use this evidence freely to prove, that you didn’t receive the package that you ordered.
It’s time for a boycott WebMD campaign. Let’s see how well they handle THAT 👹
Doing my part. I literally never visit that toxic site.
Yeah this is bullshit. Just middle and senior management trying to justify their jobs and all the expenses they’ve made on office real estate. I’ve worked 100% from home for 3 years now, and not only is my productivity much higher, but the team dynamic is better and the worker output overall is better too.
I get some people do better face to face with colleagues, and are happier and more productive. And to those people I say: Go for it! Go into the office and be at your best!
But companies should not force the rest of us to piss time and money away commuting for zero gain and just extra frustration and unhappiness.
it’s honestly blowing my mind learning recently how many people not only literally love their shitty jobs but also want to see millions of others subjugated to the grind for absolutely no net benefit
That and layoffs without firing people.
to piss time and money away commuting
So much this! Why is it OK for us to waste our most valuable resource, time?? If you waste company time or assets, you’ll be fired.
As a consumer, I will now forever remember that WebMD’s C Suite is most interested in “crushing their competition” and being heavy handed with their employees. I once thought that they were concerned about the betterment of societal health. This is how you lose your most performant employees.
I can’t believe they published this to a publically available platform like Vimeo. Did they already lose their Marketing executive?
With Kagi, WebMD never showing up again is just two clicks away:
Aaand done!
and if for whatever reason you don’t want to pay for Kagi, you can use uBlacklist to achieve the same thing with a search engine of your choice https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
Things I didn’t know I needed, thank you! Gonna give this a try right now for duckdudckgo
Oh nice.
Dude’s delusional thinking he’s going to crush Mayo Clinic while his employees pass COVID back and forth. Straight goofball thinking.
Yeah, I’m with you. At least make the video private…
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I am not even sure what webmd does, but F them.
They run a website that helps you self diagnose even the slightest illness as cancer.
Cystic fibrosis or legionairres disease.
Fucking UNIONIZE.
Just did. Won our vote Wednesday night 💪
Oh, that is righteous. Congratulations!
Louder
Web MD. The website. The website designed to make visitors feel a false sense of expertise about their health so that they don’t leave home to see a doctor about illness, is threatening their workers to leave their homes, to unnecessarily return to work, during a wave of life threatening and easily transmitable illness, that they will have to bring home.
I’m so sick and god damned tired of corporations and governments making sweeping decisions with no evidence base to back them up. I work in a field where there is no option for remote work, but I think it’s pretty clear at this point that most non-service industries can be just as effective via remote options. All of this is just about control and it’s so stupid.
I slightly disagree on one aspect. I have read several studies (relatively short term, but still) about how WFH and Remote Work employees are measurably and significantly more effective and productive than their in-office counterparts. Evidence actually supports remote work.
Yup. WFH/Remote increases productivity. Any CEO who limits their companies productivity should be relieved of their job. In office is and should be a thing of the past for most day to day operations.
Yeah, so the decision is actually counter to the evidence.
They don’t care. It’s about control and real estate.
More about real estate than anything else, to be honest. You have far more control over remote work than in the office. I know how many minutes each member of my team spends on any and all websites, can log keyboards, to the point I don’t recommend to anyone working remotely to access bank accounts on their work computers.
I don’t see how working from home changes anything. If you can do that kind of logging on their work computers at home, you can do it at the office too. Besides (in the EU at least) you have to inform employees about the extent of the monitoring beforehand. Can’t imagine how they expect to attract competent employees that way though.
You’d be surprised how much people actually just don’t care how their work computers are monitored nowadays. We disclose everything, even showed our monitoring tool to employees, and they just don’t care. I guess people know by now that personal stuff should be handled on personal devices, such as phones, tablets and computers. And the things they use their work computers for, they don’t care if we’re looking at it or not,
Funny enough, we never used those tools working in the office, even though they would work. But the fact that people are inside a controlled environment makes companies more lenient about IT security, funny enough. Having a badge seems to make computer monitoring tools redundant (even though they aren’t, of course).
But again, I do think this “back to work” movement has more to do with financial losses in real estate than real team work or control over the team. To some degree, banks, insurers and funds own us all.
Even when we were in office, I never logged into anything or browsed for anything personal on my work device. I also never connected my phone to company WiFi on principle. We have tiny pocket computers. No reason to jeopardize my job going on then reddit, now lemmy on the company device.
They ALL are on green screen. There isn’t anyone int his video present “in person”!
Totally this. There’s not a single person there who isn’t an SVP or an EVP. And I’m speaking as someone with an official title of EVP; unless you get the team to say “it’s awesome to be back in” on a video, this just comes across as so “because we say so”.
Our team is already distributed across 8 time zones and 5 countries; why do we need to be in the office to sit in the same calls across our regions?
There are some jobs that are much better done in person and then there are jobs that aren’t. For most roles, some tasks in that role is better in person, for some tasks it doesn’t make a difference and for some tasks it’s specifically better to be remote.
A video like this needs to explain WHY - and with more than just “we are better together!”; ok, but why?
Jesus. What fucking lunatics. That video never needed to exist. Just be like every other corp and send an email. At least that news story would have blended in with all the other RTO trash.
Now I’ll just forever remember that webMDs parent company is operated by unhinged boomers.
Do you want more unions?
This is how you get more unions.
Fuck around and find out. I’m ok with more unions.
Make all of us mad and put us all in close proximity. Good idea. Not one of us will consider googling “how to form a union” with a few coworkers. It’s probably too hard to do anyways (it isn’t).
Do you want more unions?
Yes.
I remember WebMD was one of the most chaotic places I worked at. It was 2000-2001 and there was a president Marv Rich and a CEO Marty Wygod. They were both building duplicate ERP systems that basically did the same thing. One day, my boss Al was in a meeting, and they told him that he needed us to move the data center to the East Coast. The most valuable part was a bunch of big EMC Symmetrix arrays with all their data. He was freaking out because he got into an argument about loading all of them into one airplane, and he didn’t want to do it. He was telling them that if the airplane goes down, all of WebMD would be gone, and it needed to be loaded onto two airplanes. I don’t know why, but for some reason, that story always reminded me of my time at WebMD.
Marty Wygod
Or, as they called him down the pub, Wygod Y.
WebMD? They realize we’re in the midst of a Covid resurgence, right? You’d think a company like that would be a bit more understanding of stuff like that, given that they’re supposed to be experts on medicine and all.
I know a few people getting RSV. They’ve been out of work for like a month.
Last year I was sick for 7 weeks with covid, RSV, the flu, and then covid again. I had to go to work while still sick with covid because I was out of sick time, even though their own policies should have prevented me from returning. I told all my coworkers to stay away from me and avoided them like I had the plague, because I essentially did. Had I actually not cared about other people’s health, I could have lied and destroyed the entire department for months with recurring spreading illness.
I had to have a meeting where I was being threatened with a PIP for attendance, while I was still sick and wearing a mask, for my job at a vaccine laboratory.
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Return to the office isn’t about medicine, it’s about entitled executives power tripping over the workers. At every medium/large company I worked for, upper management lived in its own bubble completely disconnected from the rest. I can give so many examples of poor decisions made by upper management that had a huge negative impact on the company and especially the workers. But regardless, they never gave a shit about our opinions and feedback. They didn’t even tell us why they made those decisions.
It’s about corporate real estate, profit margins, taxes, banks, interest rates, the economy, and more.
WFH has completely changed the economic landscape, and virtually all industries are impacted.
I embrace the change. Business men with shareholders do not. Banks with trillions of dollars in corporate mortgages and leases also do not. Etc.
Lolbruh. Remember that their unitary purpose is dolla dolla bill.
Are they in front of green screens? Did he not even bother to come into the office to record this?
I love response to the backlash. It’s basically “Sorry our video was cringy and tonedeaf. We have removed the cringe.”
Did they change the video? I was at least impressed that they acknowledged the interest in the video but didn’t realise they might also have made changes.
They did, and I quote:
As to comments/criticisms on the tone/style, Yeah, corporate videos are corporate videos!” the company then said, adding a shrug emoji.
I saw the original and the changed one. The only thing that it seems they’ve changed is to add the precursor message, acknowledging the palaver. The rest of the video looked the same.
Ok. Fair point. I guess I should say, they addressed their cringe. But I still thought it seemed like they were feigning concerned but actually doubling down.
Completely. Super cringe.
My wife is a business analyst and software tester (not for WebMD) and still gets awards and bonuses for excellence, even while she’s worked at home during Covid.
This guy needs to explain to me why she should be forced back into the office to improve her performance.
Because he means business! Don’t forget who thinks they’re in charge here.
Let the corporate whips crack! Let the slaves fall back in line! We want profits!
Because you’re awesome, important to us, we care about your well being. We are a big family after all!
Being in the office ≠ more profit
It in fact takes away from the workers profit.
It doesen’t matter that much, corporate ghouls have justified their existance!
