According to a new report from Business Insider, Dell introduced a return-to-office mandate in February that comes with negative consequences for remote workers to work from home.
According to BI, the back-to-work policy cracks down on remote work by making it impossible for remote workers to get a promotion or change roles. Nearly all staff will be classified as remote or hybrid starting in May, with hybrid workers required to work about three days a week.
“For remote team members, it is important to understand the tradeoffs: Career advancement, including applying for new roles in the company, will require a team member to be reclassified as an on-site hybrid,” the note reads.
The BI source at Dell collected data on the makeup of remote teams and found that affected remote employees “are overwhelmingly female.”
“This new policy at first glance appears to be anti-remote, but in practice it will be anti-woman,” the source said.
Michael Dell, President and CEO of Dell Technologies, speaks at the “New Strategies for a New Era” keynote at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, on February 27, 2024. (Photo by Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Other Dell employees told BI they think the new policy is a way to quietly fire employees. Dell laid off 5% of its workforce, about 6,650 workers, in February 2023.
Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell has previously weighed in on whether or not working in an office offers an advantage in terms of factors like promotion, performance and engagement.
“At Dell, we saw no significant differences for team members who worked remotely or in the office even before the pandemic forced everyone home,” Dell wrote in a 2022 social media post.