IBM: Customer visit costing £75 in travel? Kill it with extreme prejudice

Not just IBM

We also have a near annual moratorium on business travel, as do a few other companies I'm aware of. Doesn't usually affect me, as there's often a contract, signed in blood, for my time (in person) with the customer. For everything else, it's a very easy way to cut costs (sometimes quite significantly) in a hurry, when there's a risk of the kind of targets the Street likes not being met. Sometimes saves a little blood on the carpet :-/.

Fellow ex-beemer

Countless ways to save money rather than put stupid restrictions on people that damage customer relationships:

-Keep your skilled experienced people and stop replacing them with grads.

-Stop rewarding failure in the exec ranks and use the money to skill people up.

-Stop producing vapor-ware for the frankly stupid Think40 initiative - skill people up.

-Fire half the managers in a Russian roulette - they are all as bad as each other.

-Stop looking for ways to screw your employees out of commission and bonuses. There is a shocking amount of work that goes into making sure managers don't give 100% of the pay rise pot.

-Get rid of the actual useless dead wood of which there is a lot.

-Stop defrauding employees out of pensions and benefits - they sue you.

-Fairly sure the inventive accounting that claims a system upgrade on customer site is 'cloud' will bite them in the ass sooner than later.

I could go on but you get the point. IBM continues to saw the branch they are sitting on.

Not our money, but waste the customers'

Got out nearly 3 years ago, no pay-off just found a better job (despite IBM GBS's we'll match-that-offer...too late greedy suckers...).

Every time they rolled-out this cost-control rule I panicked. But then I realised they only really cared about IBM's costs. Not the customers'. If they were paying....well, find, fill your boots, get that late-booked flight and go. Still had to comply with the laughable "IBM-approved" hotel list and tight-as-a-nat's-chuff sustenance rules. The main point was "our money ? not a chance ! customer paying ? who cares !".

I hated the cheapness, particularly to us who were travelling far and wide away from families all week, every week, just to be either RA'd like a piece of rubbish or fobbed off with "you are so valuable you 1 and 2+ performers, you can have a 1% bonus and retention payment".

25% more pay, home every night, and not treated like shit later....glad I left.

£75?!

Here at DXC travel must have prior approval if it costs more than £0

It's a total waste of money because they are contractually within their rights to withhold reimbursement for out-of-policy expenses. So it's a load more forms for no reason whatsoever --- it just means their beancounters have to check every expense twice, once when proposed and once when incurred; and similarly, I have to record them all twice.

Interesting how different worlds apart various sectors are.

The only time I've ever been hauled over the coals in regards to my expenses was in 2006 when I worked at an institutional investment consultancy specialising in the Lloyds/London Market.

I was called into the Chairman/Founder's' office and given an almighty bollocking because I hadn't maxxed out my company credit card that month and therefore obviously hadn't spent enough time with clients (this was despite the fact that I'd just recorded a record month for new business)

Work To Rule

A place I worked at long ago, we'd get missives from HQ about some stupid new procedure and the general approach of everyone one site (usually including the management) was either to ignore it as much as possible if it was going to make things worse, or implement it thoroughly and to the letter on some important HQ-visible project. Usually when that went down the tubes the directive would be rescinded.

Another place wanted to impose a new purchasing system that would 'cut requisition approval times from a month to a week'. Our site was all WTF? because our local process typically took a few hours, so this was a step backward. We eventually got a compromise where we were all given a signing authority which was actually much higher than the informal one we'd been using so the small stuff didn[t need approval from anyone else at all. This was also when I learned that large US companies don't trust their employees not to rip off the company - news to those of us working in a responsible professional British environment and helped us understand the reasoning behind all the bureaucratic crap emanating from across the pond.

I think customers would be happy to buy from a company that is considerate about how it spends the money that the customer has paid to them.

IBM Grads

Latest on the RA front; all IBM UK grads received an email yesterday essentially asking them to describe their job, their revenue achievement to date, what they did for their manager and finally to answer the question "what would happen if you weren't here"