 Monday, September 4, 2023 in Blog  No Comments |  | !["NAME"]("admin/uploads/AA1gaAoR.jpg")
After more than two years of trying to coax workers back into offices, bosses are losing their patience.
The days of enticing employees with free food, laundry services and yoga classes are largely over. Now, executives are resorting to threats — and it’s forcing some workers to decide whether they’re willing to give up the flexibility they’ve gotten used to.
Even tech companies that were once champions of remote work are changing their tune. Zoom, whose video conferencing tool helped enable the quick transition to remote work during the pandemic, recently asked employees who live within 50 miles of a Zoom office to start coming in at least twice a week. Facebook parent company Meta recently revised its return-to-office policy, telling employees they could face termination if they do not come in at least three days a week starting Sept. 5.
At Amazon, remote workers must decide whether to move or give up their jobs, with some facing a significantly higher cost of living. At a recent meeting, chief executive Andy Jassy was blunt: If you can’t commit to returning to the office three days a week, Jassy said, “it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.”
The new pushes for in-person work mark a major shift as executives directly acknowledge the challenges with the model — in some cases saying productivity has declined, and citing fewer opportunities for spontaneous collaboration, mentorship and connection-building. Meanwhile, employers have new leverage as the labor market has cooled, leaving workers less room to be choosy.
“The pendulum has shifted from employees having all the power,” said Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures, a venture fund in Toronto that works with early stage companies across North America. The bulk of start-up founders he works with are requiring employees to be in offices a few days a week, although there’s pushback.
“During the pandemic, a lot of salespeople were taking calls from the top of mountains on hiking trips,” Cohen said. “That’s not working anymore.”
Zoom spokesperson Danielle Stickler said a structured hybrid approach is most effective for the company, adding that it leaves Zoom “in a better position to use our own technologies.” Meta’s return to office policy asks teams to prioritize time together to foster strong collaboration and a vibrant culture, spokesperson Dave Arnold said.
Amazon is supplying “relocation support” for employees being asked to move, who represent “a relatively small percentage” of its workforce, though it didn’t specify what that support entailed.
“There’s more energy, collaboration, and connections happening since we’ve been working together at least three days per week,” Amazon spokesman Rob Munoz said. “We’ve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices.”
Even with millions of workers across the country being asked to return to their cubicles, office occupancy has been relatively static for the past year. The country’s top 10 metropolitan areas averaged 47.2 percent of pre-pandemic levels last week, according to data from Kastle Systems. This time last year, the average was around 44 percent.
The lagging return is vexing leaders from city halls to the Oval Office as downtowns struggle to rebound from the pandemic. President Biden recently called on Cabinet officials to urge their employees to return to offices this fall, as downtown D.C. struggles to regain its pre-pandemic crush of commuters. (A July report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office showed that 17 of 24 federal agencies had average building utilization of 25 percent or less.)
About 52 percent of remote-capable U.S. workers are operating under hybrid arrangements, according to data from Gallup, while 29 percent are exclusively remote. And though executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have argued that the rise of flexible work has had a deleterious effect on productivity, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that labor productivity rose 3.7 percent in the second quarter of 2023 and is up 1.3 percent compared to this time last year.
While employers cite the collaborative benefits of spending time together in person, the majority of hybrid arrangements aren’t fostering the connections bosses want to see, according to Rob Cross, associate professor of management at Babson College who studies collaboration across various companies through surveys, email and meeting data. He’s found that mandates for a certain number of days in office are missing the mark, “because you’re not getting the right people who need to collaborate.”
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