The longer the pandemic has stretched on, the harder it’s become to tell employees to come back to the office, particularly full time
Companies in the Silicon Valley that embraced remote work during the pandemic, are now struggling over how to recall their high-paid employees to the offices that have been designed for teamwork. Technology companies that led the change are the ones confronting this new challenge. They are confused as to how, when and even whether the long-isolated employees will come back to the office.
“I thought this period of remote work would be the most challenging year-and-half of my career, but it’s not,” the Independent quoted Brent Hyder, Chief People Officer for business software maker Salesforce and its roughly 65,000 employees worldwide. “Getting everything started back up the way it needs to be is proving to be even more difficult.”
The rapid spread of the delta variant has made the transition even more complicated. While the plans many tech companies had for bringing back most of their workers near or after Labor Day weekend had to be shelved, Microsoft has pushed those dates back to October while Apple Google, Facebook, Amazon and a growing list of others have already decided wait until next year.
Tech companies’ return-to-office policies are surely going to affect in one way or the other, other industries as well. In fact employers’ next steps could redefine how and where people work, predicts Laura Boudreau, a Columbia University assistant economics professor who studies workplace issues.
“We have moved beyond the theme of remote work being a temporary thing,” Boudreau says. “The longer the pandemic has stretched on, she says, the harder it’s become to tell employees to come back to the office, particularly full time.”
Most tech companies insist that their employees should work in office two or three days each week after the pandemic is over most tech jobs are fit for remote work, since they revolve around digital and online products.
The transition from the pandemic should enable smaller tech companies to adopt more flexible work-from-home policies that may help them lure away top-notch engineers from other firms
Tech companies believe that employees clustered together in a physical space will swap ideas and spawn innovations that probably wouldn’t happen in isolation. Corporate campuses with common areas for brainstorming sessions are essential for innovation, they feel.
Says Christy Lake, chief people officer for business software maker Twilio, “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle and tell people, ‘Oh you have to be back in the office or innovation won’t happen.’ “
The hybrid approach permitting employees to toggle between remote and in-office work has been widely embraced in the technology industry. Even Zoom the Silicon Valley videoconferencing service says most of its employees still prefer to come into the office part of the time. “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to returning to the office,” Kelly Steckelberg, Zoom’s chief financial officer, recently wrote in a blog post. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have made it clear that they want most of their workers together at least a few days each week to maintain their culture and pace of innovation.
Ed Zitron, who runs a public relations firm says, “The only reason to have an office is to satisfy managers with vested interests in grouping people together, so that they can look at them and feel good about the people that they own … so that they can enjoy that power.”
The transition from the pandemic should enable smaller tech companies to adopt more flexible work-from-home policies that may help them lure away top-notch engineers from other firms.
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