Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Return-to-office mandate reaches inevitable conclusion

Dell, after telling employees in March they're expected to be in the office three days a week, has ordered its salespeople to be onsite for the full working week when not with customers and partners.

"The announcement was to our sales team stating that we expect them to come into the office or be together with customer and partners five days a week," a spokesperson for the computer giant told The Register today.

"We continually evolve our business so we’re set up to deliver the best innovation, value and service to our customers and partners. That includes more in-person connection to drive market leadership."

Asked to clarify the portion of the workforce affected, Dell declined.

Dell last month committed to laying off an undisclosed number of employees, reportedly as high as 10 percent of the Texas-headquartered corporation. The tech seller said [PDF] it had 133,000 workers as of February last year. Following layoffs of about 13,000 in 2023, its global workforce is presently about 120,000.

An individual posting to Reddit claims to have re-typed the return-to-office (RTO) memo by hand to avoid being identified – some orgaizations vary the formatting and/or content of internal documents so they're unique for every recipient as a means of tracking leaks.

The memo – which mirrors a copy The Register has seen privately from another source – is attributed to Bill Scannell, president of global sales and customer operations, and John Byrne, president of sales for global regions with Dell Tech Select. Dell declined to comment on whether the missives are authentic or not.

The executives, it's claimed, argue sales teams need to be together to thrive and that internal data shows sales folks are more productive when onsite.

"With that in mind, starting Monday, Sept 30th, the expectation is that ALL global sales team members who can work from a Dell office be onsite five days a week, regardless of role. Field sellers who can’t go into a Dell office should prioritize time spent in person with customers and partners," the memos we've seen state.

"Remote sales team members who can’t go into a Dell office should continue to work remotely. More communications pertaining to remote workers will be sent in the coming weeks."

The purported memo acknowledges this is "a shift from current expectations," and that those who have organized their lives around being in the office just three days a week may have to make some adjustments.

When Dell asked staff to be in the office three days per week, employees told The Register the demand represented a way to reduce the need for layoffs by driving enough staff to quit. We were also told that the move would disproportionately affect women, who tend to work remotely more frequently than male colleagues.

IT consultancy Gartner said as much in May, concluding that RTO mandates aren't worth the risk.

"High-performers may feel especially resentful about mandates, particularly if they maintained performance or over-delivered during the pandemic," said Jennifer Collins, Gartner operations program manager. "They may perceive RTO mandates as a signal of mistrust from management."

As if to demonstrate that mistrust, Dell's RTO push earlier this year led the corporation to implement a color-coded system to track workplace attendance.

Dell, however, is not alone in its efforts to force employees to help justify pre-pandemic real-estate investment, tax breaks linked to employee attendance, and waste time commuting and polluting. Earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told staff that he wanted them onsite full-time starting January. Amazonians have not been thrilled with the RTO mandate. A poll indicates a lot of them are considering jumping ship. ®