The large UK broadcaster I work for is having to make large amounts of savings. They've decided that they don't like paying for slack (for £10 per user per month), and instead are going to force everyone to use MS Teams.
Since 95% of people have been working from home (and no plans for most to go back this year), they won't allow people to take unused monitors back because they might end up lost. These are £80 monitors.
It's these pathetic nickle-and-diming that is far more likely to make me look for another job than not paying a £200 a year pay rise.
Someone sees "£80 times 20,000 staff, that's over £1m, we can't risk that!"
Saving £1.6 million/month isn't nickel-and-diming. That's almost £20 million/annually, which is more than many companies make.
As for the monitors, that may be COVID19 related. If the office is locked up, there are almost always physical/security procedures that must be followed in order to allow non-essential staff into the office...and that doesn't include any cleaning or sanitation that might be required by any COVID19 rules. This means that you need to have someone physically come to the office to open it up. On top of that, you need someone knowledgeable about the hardware (i.e., IT) to come in to make sure any employee taking a monitor home doesn't mess up anyone else's setup.
So you're risking exposing at least two lower-paid employees to COVID19 for the convenience of one higher-paid employee who could just buy his own goddamn monitor for £80 if he cares about the screen real estate that much.
Our offices are still open, just with 10% of the staff in them.
And the "£1.6m a month" view is the problem -- if you are spending £5k a month, or 40p a minute, on the costs of keeping an employee (probably more with the cost of office space), an extra £10 a month is neither here nor there. If it costs just 1 minute extra a day, you're losing.
The 1.6M figure is based on a company with 20,000 employees. How many of them have less than 20M in revenue?
Also, your units are wrong. 1.6M is the total amount being risked. There is no realistic risk of losing that much every month unless you think that every employee is going to lose their monitor every month.
from what I hear of our management Slack's enterprise sales folk are a bit shit w.r.t working out deals and the like. 10 quid per person, for context, is roughly the price of all the MS software stack if you're a decent size.
So for 10-bob you get email, word, excel, teams and exchange/AzureAD -- or a chat app.
So that's the context that they're dealing with; but I fucking hate teams with white hot passion. So I still get annoyed.
And yes, these nickle and dime tactics are rife everywhere, we buy 3k computers for people but our budget for a monitor is 70gbp and it is supposed to last 6 years. :|
Accounting uses excel so everyone who interacts with accounting needs excel.
Then those who interact with accounting (HR, Purchasing) use excel so everyone they come into contact with needs excel.
There's is a metric which is called "Cost per head" used in my company, and it goes like;
1 Person:
* 1 Windows license
* 1 Office license
* 1 Visio license
* 1 Swarm license
* 1 Perforce license
* 1 Jetbrains license (optional)
* 1 Slack license
* 1 jira license
* 1 confluence license
* 1 gitlab license
* 1 Terraform Enterprise license (optional)
* 1 headcount in some HR software
and that's just what I can remember.
Controversial hot-take from one of our IT directors:
<user> Just wondering why can't we just use slack and not use Teams at all :thinking_face: Slack seems so much better.
<itDirector> So, just to put this out there, I started this Slack originally. So it's a topic close to my heart.
<itDirector> But ultimately right now, Teams is eating the fuck out of Slack's lunch.
<itDirector> Teams is included within our M365 license, for all users, at a fraction of the price of Slack.
<itDirector> Likewise, all of the integrations, SSO, features, etc., come bundled in the existing license.
<itDirector> For Slack, they continue to push Enterprise Grid licensing costs of over 300 USD per user per year
<itDirector> Additionally, there are more people now starting to push us to formally drop Slack than Teams. Some studios are mandating the usage of Teams over Slack, as well as some projects.
<itDirector> Personally, I see several features still missing before such a conversation can hold weight. Teams will have private channels added in November, and I'm hoping they address file permissions, non-threaded channel chat and lifting of the 250 user limit in individual chats.
<itDirector> But once that happens, it's going to be extremely difficult for Slack to compete.
<itDirector> So, to manage expectations - I would not anticipate a future where Slack is chosen over Teams. It's probably best to start acclimating to that reality now.
By removing slack this adds a ton of work as all the integrations and workflows that have been built into slack over the years need to be rebuilt.
All to save 0.2% of the cost of a person
Now in our specific company the latest hotness only lasts about 2 years, from messanger to lync to skype to zoom to teams. Each is massively disruptive and comes as a major project for a team of project managers.
(They are also trying to downgrade us to office 365, which for our purposes removes archived emails more than 3 years old)
Now for a beancounter it may seem that spending £6k a month on someone, then pissing them off by making a £10 a month saving, it worthwhile. That's because the beancounter doesn't factor in the cost of pissing people off.
Since 95% of people have been working from home (and no plans for most to go back this year), they won't allow people to take unused monitors back because they might end up lost. These are £80 monitors.
It's these pathetic nickle-and-diming that is far more likely to make me look for another job than not paying a £200 a year pay rise.
Someone sees "£80 times 20,000 staff, that's over £1m, we can't risk that!"