End of an era: Zoom tells employees to return to office for work::Zoom is asking all of its employees to return to the office for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, when the tech company blew up as one of the main means of communication when people were forced to work from home.
I’m not sure why so many companies are obsessed with getting their employees back to the office, not needing to have everyone within a 1 hour radius of your offices opens a lot of doors when it comes to recruitment while not affecting performance.
I’d speculate some combination of control over employees (poor management practices, etc) and making use of owned land/offices that are difficult to sell otherwise. Not much else makes sense to me, especially for tech companies where nearly the entire job exists in virtual space of some kind - no wrenches to turn.
Edit: Someone else suggested a way to “lay off” folks by having them voluntarily leave the job to avoid the return to office. That also sounds pretty plausible to me with the extent to which companies are starting to squeeze with what feels like an incoming recession period.
Using it as a way to reduce your workforce is so short sighted. The top performers are the ones most capable of getting a new job and most willing to leave over the issue. Instead of it being a calculated set of layoffs in specific areas of the company it’ll just be all the good employees leaving.
Recent analysis of data suggests that productivity suffers when employees work remotely, and the effect is more dramatic the longer people remain away. This contradicts earlier studies conducted during the pandemic.
I’m not saying I agree… just that this is the reason.
Do you have any sources? All I can find is articles from Forbes
Here is a recent paper that showed an 18% decline in productivity when workers moved remotely.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515.
Another study, originally published during the pandemic, initially found an 8% increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer when they began working from home. The original study is here.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/eharrington/publications/working-remotely-selection-treatment-and-market-provision-remote-work.
Apparently new analysis of the data has shown a 4% decline instead of an 8% improvement. I can’t find the revised analysis but this was quoted in Bloomberg and the Economist … both behind pay walls unfortunately.