At work there's a new tenant in our building. Originally the site was built and fully occupied by my company. It's a five storey building. After several rounds of restructuring and such a decision was made to seek tenants to rent out some of the space.
It took a few months but IBM has now moved in and taken over the 5th floor entirely. Welcome IBM! We've seen them around the elevators and 1st floor cafeteria a bit. They seem like decent blokes. There were a few stragglers up on 5 and they were just absorbed into the
lower floors a few months ago. There's still a good amount of space so it wasn't disruptive in my area.
Someone mentioned to me last week that the Halifax site is the only IBM facility in the world with free coffee. Apparently that is a global IBM policy. This is because the cafeteria has free coffee from the existing contract with my company. Don't be upset IBMers worldwide, the free coffee is awful, sludge, pretty much undrinkable. It's free and you get what you pay for.
Still something occurred to me and IBM may have already done this. What they could do is set up a jar on their floor and anytime someone gets a free coffee downstairs they have to put say 25 cents or whatever into the jar. Every few months or so the jar is counted up and donated to some local charity. This would then respect the spirit of the no free coffee rule while being a feel good initiative for the employees.
There was another change in the wake of IBM's arrival. The outside smoking area has been restored. There was an original smoking area about 100 feet outside the side doors. One day a couple of years ago or so HR announced that worldwide all staff smoking areas were ended and the employees had to go off-campus to smoke. But now with shared space IBM cares more about the tiny percentage of employees who are smokers and requires them to be accommodated on site. So the designated smoking area is back.
I'm glad the smoking area is back. I don't smoke myself so it might seem irrelevant to me one way or the other. I was concerned about the safety and security of my coworkers while at work. After all let's consider the unintended consequences of the HR decision to kick the smokers off campus.
Well first of all by going off campus they immediately lose the protection of the corporate security guard patrols. By definition security's realm is limited to the campus grounds. When employees step off campus they are on their own and thus exposed.
The other major issue with off campus smoking is that they were moved out of sight from the cubicles. With the on site smoking area we can see them from where we sit. Thus if there's some disturbance or security problem we can raise security from our desks or rush outside ourselves. With offsite smoking a bad actor can easily walk up to the smokers unseen from the building and create trouble. Again the smokers are exposed to additional risk.
So I'm glad IBM put the safety and security of their employees ahead of the agenda of certain anti-smoking busybodies in HR.
3 comments:
Are you seriously concerned that smokers off grounds will be attacked? lol
I'm glad that IBM, like me, cares enough about the safety and security of their employees while at work to ensure that they have corporate security protection while on break.
You obviously don't care and perhaps you feel that the smokers "deserve" to be exposed to attack or even attacked.
You also clearly don't know where the smokers were sent and how dangerously exposed they were. the area was invisible from within the building. also there are no other tenants around and the office is 24hr so a wife abuser or whoever could lie in wait undetected
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anyway hit the road anonymous loltroll. you contributed nothing to this discussion
lol, They are more likely to die from their smoking then from being attacked. Besides it's their choice whether to smoke or not. They don't have to go out if they don't feel safe. They can do it on their own time when they leave work. People who smoke at work take more breaks and longer breaks from work than those who do not smoke. How does that benefit the company?
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