‘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
We still have them in Canada!
Well, good news—Macy’s has brought them back.
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
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.
That and layoffs without firing people.
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.
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.
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”!
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.
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.
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.”
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!
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.
