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May 2021
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Employees Are Feeling Burned Over Broken Work-From-Home Promises As Employers Try To Bring Them Back To The Office

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As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers over remote work.A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C. magazine that suggested workers could lose benefits like health care if they insist on continuing to work remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. The staff reacted by refusing to publish for a day.While the CEO later apologized, she isn't alone in appearing to bungle the transition back to the office after over a year in which tens of millions of employees were forced to work from home. A recent survey of full-time corporate or government employees found that two-thirds say their employers either have not communicated a post-pandemic office strategy or have only vaguely done so.As workforce scholars, we are interested in teasing out how workers are dealing with this situation. Our recent research found that this failure to communicate clearly is hurting morale, culture and retention.Workers relocatingWe first began investigating workers' pandemic experiences in July 2020 as shelter-in-place orders shuttered offices and remote work was widespread. At the time, we wanted to know how workers were using their newfound freedom to potentially work virtually from anywhere.We analyzed a dataset that a business and technology newsletter attained from surveying its 585,000 active readers. It asked them whether they planned to relocate during the next six months and to share their story about why and where from and to.After a review, we had just under 3,000 responses, including 1,361 people who were planning to relocate or had recently done so. We systematically coded these responses to understand their motives and, based on distances moved, the degree of ongoing remote-work policy they would likely need.We found that a segment of these employees would require a full remote-work arrangement based on the distance moved from their office, and another portion would face a longer commute. Woven throughout this was the explicit or implicit expectation of some degree of ongoing remote work among many of the workers who moved during the pandemic.In other words, many of these workers were moving on the assumption - or promise - that they'd be able to keep working remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic ended. Or they seemed willing to quit if their employer didn't oblige.

One of authors explains the research.
We wanted to see how these expectations were being met as the pandemic started to wind down in March 2021. So we searched online communities in Reddit to see what workers were saying. One forum proved particularly useful. A member asked, Has your employer made remote work permanent yet or is it still in the air? and went on to share his own experience. This post generated 101 responses with a good amount of detail on what their respective individual companies were doing.While this qualitative data is only a small sample that is not necessarily representative of the U.S. population at large, these posts allowed us to delve into a richer understanding of how workers feel, which a simple stat can't provide.We found a disconnect between workers and management that starts with but goes beyond the issue of the remote-work policy itself. Broadly speaking, we found three recurring themes in these anonymous posts.1. Broken remote-work promisesOthers have also found that people are taking advantage of pandemic-related remote work to relocate to a city at a distance large enough that it would require partial or full-time remote work after people return to the office.A recent survey by consulting firm PwC found that almost a quarter of workers were considering or planning to move more than 50 miles from one of their employer's main offices. The survey also found 12% have already made such a move during the pandemic without getting a new job.Our early findings suggested some workers would quit their current job rather than give up their new location if required by their employer, and we saw this actually start to occur in March.One worker planned a move from Phoenix to Tulsa with her fianc to get a bigger place with cheaper rent after her company went remote. She later had to leave her job for the move, even though they told me they would allow me to work from home, then said never mind about it.Another worker indicated the promise to work remotely was only implicit, but he still had his hopes up when leaders gassed us up for months saying we'd likely be able to keep working from home and come in occasionally and then changed their minds and demanded employees return to the office once vaccinated.2. Confused remote-work policiesAnother constant refrain we read in the worker comments was disappointment in their company's remote-work policy - or lack thereof.Whether workers said they were staying remote for now, returning to the office or still unsure, we found that nearly a quarter of the people in our sample said their leaders were not giving them meaningful explanations of what was driving the policy. Even worse, the explanations sometimes felt confusing or insulting.One worker complained that the manager wanted butts in seats because we couldn't be trusted to [work from home] even though we'd been doing it since last March, adding: I'm giving my notice on Monday.Another, whose company issued a two-week timeline for all to return to the office, griped: Our leadership felt people weren't as productive at home. While as a company we've hit most of our goals for the year. Makes no sense.After a long period of office shutterings, it stands to reason workers would need time to readjust to office life, a point expressed in recent survey results. Employers that quickly flip the switch in calling workers back and do so with poor clarifying rationale risk appearing tone-deaf.It suggests a lack of trust in productivity at a time when many workers report putting in more effort than ever and being strained by the increased digital intensity of their job - that is, the growing number of online meetings and chats.And even when companies said they wouldn't require a return to the office, workers still faulted them for their motives, which many employees described as financially motivated.We are going hybrid, one worker wrote. I personally don't think the company is doing it for us. I think they realized how efficient and how much money they are saving.Only a small minority of workers in our sample said their company asked for input on what employees actually want from a future remote work policy. Given that leaders are rightly concerned about company culture, we believe they are missing a key opportunity to engage with workers on the issue and show their policy rationales aren't only about dollars and cents.3. Corporate culture 'BS'Management gurus such as Peter Drucker and other scholars have found that corporate culture is very important to binding together workers in an organization, especially in times of stress.A company's culture is essentially its values and beliefs shared among its members. That's harder to foster when everyone is working remotely.That's likely why corporate human resource executives rank maintaining organizational culture as their top workforce priority for 2021.But many of the forum posts we reviewed suggested that employer efforts to do that during the pandemic by orchestrating team outings and other get-togethers were actually pushing workers away, and that this type of culture building was not welcome.[Like what you've read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation's daily newsletter.]One worker's company had everyone come into the office for an outdoor luncheon a week ago, according to a post, adding: Idiots.Surveys have found that what workers want most from management, on the issue of corporate culture, are more remote-work resources, updated policies on flexibility and more communication from leadership.As another worker put it, I can tell you, most people really don't give 2 flips about 'company culture' and think it's BS.The ConversationKimberly Merriman, Professor of Management, Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell; David Greenway, Doctoral Candidate in Leadership/Organization Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Tamara Montag-Smit, Assistant Professor of Business, University of Massachusetts LowellThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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posted at: 12:00am on 26-May-2021
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Getting Absurd: Twitch Creates A 'Hot Tub' Channel, Says It Should Have Communicated With Streamers About Demonitization

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Twitch seems to be putting on some sort of master class in how to respond to a crisis on its platform in as confusing a manner as possible. Without writing a thousand word summary, this whole thing started when Twitch nuked a bunch of streamer content in response to a backlog of DMCA notices, changed its affiliate program without notice, hung its streamers out to dry over the DMCAs when the backlash occurred, and basically angered the hell out of its most important asset, it's creative community. This basically set the theme for the public that Twitch wasn't treating its community very well.This continued to the present. Most recently, we discussed one streamer suddenly having her channel demonitized, ostensibly over so called "hot tub meta" streams, in which she appears in a bathing suit in a hot tub. While Twitch can do as it pleases with its platform, the real issue here was that all of this was done without any communication or notice from Twitch to the streamer, who goes by the handle Amouranth. Well, it turns out that she wasn't alone in having her channel suddenly demonitized in this fashion.

The company also addressed the recent controversy surrounding the sudden, uncommunicated demonetization of Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa’s channel, which took place earlier this week in reaction to complaints which Siragusa says came from from a single advertiser (Siragusa told Kotaku in an email that Twitch would not say which advertiser). Twitch’s post seems to dispute this characterization, instead attributing it to “the majority of our advertiser base.” Siragusa, however, was not alone. Sources have since told Kotaku that a number of streamers had advertising removed from their channels, though it seems that not all of them noticed or said anything publicly. This has alarmed Twitch streamers, who are now in the dark as to what’s considered advertiser-friendly content and what’s not—meaning they, too, are at risk of suddenly not being able to make money off Twitch ads anymore. In the blog post, Twitch did not do much to assuage their fears, but it did confirm that demonetization is a thing that can happen now.“On Twitch, brands get to decide where and when their ads appear,” the company wrote. “Today, they can target or avoid specific categories of content and flag channels that don’t meet their standards. This means that Twitch, in rare cases, will suspend advertising on a channel at the advertisers’ request. We absolutely do not permit brands to use protected characteristics as a filter for advertising targeting or blocking.”
Note that this is all communication that occurred after the fact. Acknowledging that, Twitch specifically stated that the way it had treated Amouranth was a "mistake." As was the lack of communication with all of the other streamers who had their channels demonitized. As was not getting the communication about what control advertisers had over channels receiving ad revenue until after all this occurred. Mistake after mistake, all of which quite frankly appear to be conscious decisions rather than oopsies.And, in an almost exact replication of the ready-fire-aim method Twitch employed for its DMCA debacle, the company's remedy for this now is to roll out more tools for advertisers and creators to avoid this situation that should have been avoided with those tools in the first place.
To remedy this and other issues, Twitch said it’s “working to develop more robust controls for advertisers and viewers to enable them to control their experiences on our service.” It’s also working on figuring out how to communicate to streamers what exactly “brand safe” means, but this functionality will apparently “take time to build and implement.”
The other plan Twitch has coming out of this latest situation is, and I cannot stress enough that this is real, the introduction of "hot tub" channels and the like.
In a new blog post today, Twitch announced that it has created a new category: “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches.” Previously, hot tub streamers largely used the catch-all Just Chatting category, which led some streamers and viewers to accuse them of somehow breaking the rules—despite the fact that they were not actually breaking Twitch’s rules. In the blog post, Twitch clarified this.“While we have guidelines about sexually suggestive content, being found to be sexy by others is not against our rules, and Twitch will not take enforcement action against women, or anyone on our service, for their perceived attractiveness,” the company wrote, adding that it discourages harassment against all streamers regardless of their actions or intentions. “Under our current Nudity & Attire and Sexually Suggestive Content policies, streamers may appear in swimwear in contextually appropriate situations (at the beach, in a hot tub, for example), and we allow creative expression like body writing and body painting, provided the streamer has appropriate coverage as outlined by our attire policy.”
So, Amouranth did nothing wrong as far as Twitch is concerned, but it still demonitized her channel at the request of "advertisers" for reasons never fully articulated, not against Twitch's rules, without notice or communication, and with an almost perfect lack of transparency. But, hey, here's a new hot tub category for you all to stream in? The only real use I see for that is I can finally pitch Mike on my idea for a speedo-clad Twitch Techdirt stream where I yell about beer trademarks in a kiddie pool.This is where I remind you that Twitch is an Amazon property and has hefty resources to pull from to do its platform and PR right. It just doesn't seem to want to and the one left holding the proverbial bag is its creative community.Cool.

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posted at: 12:00am on 26-May-2021
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