What Barrett Kime’s boss said in a recent video call was simple. Can his NBCUniversal team members show up a few days a week when they were actually expected to be in the office?
A riot ensued. Mr. Kime, senior creative director, has resigned. “I talked about how crazy it is to ask people to come with the raging Covid more often,” he recalls.
Other employees then jumped in to share the reasons why they did not want to return to the office: childcare, rising gas prices, Covid-19 tariffs. For Mr Kime, this marked a new phase in their talks on returning to the office.
“It’s like the Wizard of Oz,” Mr Kime said. In other words, his team realized that there was no omnipotent being who forced their presence; there was only a man behind a curtain (or a magnification screen). “No matter how much we grumbled about going back to work, we all knew it was going to happen. But the moment we left, we realized how stupid it was, “he added.
Optimism about return-to-office plans in various industries and cities is slowly waning. When asked in early 2021 about the proportion of their workers who will return to the office five days a week in the future, executives said 50 percent; now that percentage has dropped to 20, according to a recent study by consulting firm Gartner. Office occupancy across the country rose to about 43 percent last month as Covid’s case rose again, according to Kastle, a security firm.
The majority of Americans, especially those in the service sector and low-paid jobs, have worked personally throughout the pandemic. But those who could work remotely became attached to flexibility. In a January study, the Pew Research Center found that 60% of workers whose work can be done at home want to work remotely most of the time or all the time.
“What is quite clear is that there are fewer and fewer companies expecting their employees to be in the office five days a week,” said Brian Crop, Gartner’s vice president of human resources. “Even some of the big companies that came out and said we wanted our office workers five days a week are starting to retire.”
There is Apple, which recently stopped requiring employees to return to the office at least three days a week. There is McKinsey, which intends at some point to set clearer rules on office attendance in order to ensure that people receive the value of personal cooperation, but for now allows people to enter into agreements with their customers and managers, according to his head of human resources. resources.
Google has postponed its return to the office, scheduled for January, and so far approximately 10 percent of its employees have received permission to move away completely or relocate. At one point, Intuit was considering a firm plan to return to the office for its 11,500 employees in the United States, but instead allowed managers and teams to set their expectations for which days to enter.
“Being prescribing creates all kinds of bureaucracy, because then you have to involve the management and it’s just becoming very rule-based,” said Sassan Gudarzi, CEO of Intuit. “We don’t believe you have to be in the office 40 hours a week, and we also don’t believe you can be completely virtual.”
The RTO plans evolved into a giant chicken game. Executives told the workers to return to the office, then postponed their plans as Covid’s cases continued to rise. Business leaders accepted the uncertainty, hoping it was temporary. Until it became clear that this was not the case. The workers were given extra time at home and extra freedom to test the firmness of their bosses’ plans. Now some companies are waiting for people to return, but have lost the leverage to do so due to the constant flow of deadlines.
“What we decided to do was say ‘What’s up?'” Said Joan Burke, human resources manager at DocuSign, who postponed four return dates to the office before deciding not to be present for the time being. “Let’s learn from what works and put up guardrails if we think things aren’t.”
New office culture
The last two years have profoundly changed the way we work.
Some executives hope that if they can get their employees to spend some time in the office, workers will realize that they liked it more than they remembered.
Christina Ross, CEO of Cube, a software company with 75 employees, was considered a proud employee of the office. Prior to the pandemic, she hired an engineer who lived in Texas and insisted that he move to New York for work. She could not imagine building a long-term relationship with an employee she had never met in person.
She now calls her company “remote first.” She briefly toyed with the idea of demanding a return to Cube’s office, but instead decided to make it the most tempting option possible. She even moved the location to New York to make it easier for employees living in Brooklyn to get to work.
“People voted with their feet that they don’t have to come back,” Ms Ross said. “It can be frustrating to put a lot of effort into building an office environment and then not getting people in.”
Some business leaders have taken a firmer stance. Elon Musk, for example, told SpaceX and Tesla employees they would have to spend at least 40 hours in the office or be fired. Many others, such as Google and Microsoft, have opted for a softer way, filling their workplaces with cold brews, snacks, bags and beer. But these corporate carrots have their limits and few are willing to try the sticks.
“It’s almost like a meme from the office for 2018 -” Hey, we have pretzels and snacks and ping pong tables, “said Ms. Ross. “This is not a compromise to travel to work.”
Many companies accept the reality that the requirement to return to the office can put them at odds with their peers and mean a loss of talent. In some industries and in some parts of the country, office-oriented culture is becoming strange, not the norm.
Duolingo, a Pittsburgh-based language study company, required employees to return three days a week; The head of the company’s human resources said he was still confident that he would achieve his hiring goals. Christiana Riley, America’s chief executive at Deutsche Bank, said her company’s decision to require its 5,000 New York City employees to be back in the office either full-time or at least two days a week, depending on their role. , is important outside the business in its contribution to the reconstruction of the city. Brown-Foreman, a wine and spirits company, called most of its 950 corporate employees in Louisville, Kentucky, back to headquarters at least three days a week, starting last month.
“Although Brown-Foreman has not seen an eviction because of our return-to-office policies, we could,” said Eric Doninger, director of real estate and workplace strategies, explaining that the company has come to terms with the risks. “Our facilities play a role in building business, building cooperation and camaraderie.”
Other executives are demanding a full return, confident in the value of the people at their desks five days a week. Tom Siebel, CEO of C3 AI, an 800-man artificial intelligence company, demanded that his employees return to the full-time office last June. He said the requirement has only made the company more attractive to certain types of job applicants.
“For people who want to work from home at Zoom, there are companies that are,” he said. “Go work for Facebook. Go to work for Salesforce. ”
Mr Siebel said he had “the only full car park in Silicon Valley” and saw this as a competitive advantage. “We don’t invent rockets that land on their own from people working on Zoom calls once a week,” he added. “We have to get together in one room and get on whiteboards and fail, fail and fail until you succeed.
But for executives who have not doubled, bigger questions loom over the future of their offices. Take Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach, an artificial intelligence sales company with about 600 employees in Seattle, most of whom are encouraged to spend 40 percent of their office time. From an almost empty office, Mr Medina said he was used to employees’ challenges about the value of personal collaboration.
Recently, a junior official attended the CEO’s virtual working hours and said he did not understand why he should be required to travel to work when working from home, which allows him to balance productivity with his social life and jiu-jitsu training. .
“I said, ‘Fair point of view and you need to think about your priority,'” Mr Medina said. “If you want to be an MMA fighter, do it.”
Mr Medina has been fighting for the office for years. He was once asked to discuss Zapier’s CEO in front of thousands of people about the office’s merits over remote work. The majority of the audience voted for his opponent.
“I took the losing end of the conversation,” Mr Medina said. “But it wasn’t like losing in a landslide.”
This dispute was in 2017. Five years later it is not over. “There is a fried chicken near the office, which I only get when I’m in the office,” Mr Medina added. “I see the ocean from my office. Why not do it? “
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