Negative Letter Memo to Human Resources Director

Negative Letter

Memo to Human Resources Director

Reversal of the Work at Home (WAH) policy

Dear HR Director:

It is my understanding that you are planning to revoke the current WAH policy, and require all employees not having specifically assigned duties at another location to be present in their offices or cubicles. I believe this policy change to be counter-productive for our company, because the new policy creates more problems than it solves.

First, there is the issue of this directive going against the company's green initiatives. Requiring all employees to commute to our HQ location uses additional fuel and further damages the environment with pollution. It also requires the company to spend more money to lease larger offices and pay higher utility bills; in this economy we would prefer to cut costs, not increase them.

There's also the issue of employee productivity. With the average commute for each of our employees taking anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes each way daily, we are talking about a considerable impact to their schedules. Given that we frequently ask our employees to go the extra mile on behalf of our customers, it just makes sense that we empower them to do their jobs in the most productive way possible, including allowing them to work at home.

There are those who say that employees won't work if there isn't a supervisor nearby, looking over their shoulders, clocking them in and out. I grant you that this is true of some people; but what's to stop them from driving into the office, and still sitting at their desks doing next to nothing? Meanwhile we will have penalized everyone else, and have few productivity gains, if any, to show for it.

Picture this instead: wouldn't our management team look a lot better if we came up with ways to help our people work more efficiently from home? There are any number of technology tools that do just that, and we just need to find them. Maybe we can brainstorm some possibilities at the next staff meeting. Also, we can give our sales team a much more powerful story to tell potential customers when they explain how we reduced our carbon footprint but kept our customer satisfaction numbers high by encouraging our people to work at home; after all it makes us look more socially responsible than our competition.

So let me just summarize why reversing the work at home policy doesn't work for the company: it drives up our costs at a time when we should be cutting expenses; it costs our employees unnecessary time and stress to commute when they could just as easily work at home; it violates our green initiatives; we don't gain anything except reinforcing the negative management style that some managers adhere to without any concrete proof that it is effective.