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.
Clickbaity article
Zoom […] is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
So it’s not “all of it’s employees”. Plus, it’s a hybrid schedule, which, for better or worse, has now become a standard across most organisations around the world.
Not that clickbait though. They are selling a product that makes WFH possible and yet aren’t fully utilizing it. Where are they located? 50 miles is a long commute.
I honestly think it’s good to get into the office space just for a change of mentality and scenery and a little socialization. Helps you get out of being at home all the time kind of funk.
Pretty bad optics when your company depends on enabling collaboration in virtual settings.
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I never understood this tactic. Why demoralize your whole workforce for months until enough motivated and talented people leave that you don’t have to fire anyone. The useless ones are never the first ones to leave, especially if they don’t have any talents to sell to other companies. Also people don’t leave immediately after it turns bad, it usually takes months for them to be demoralized enough and find new arrangements.
By that time wouldn’t it be smarter to eat the cost of firing people from the start, get rid of the fat, pay the severance and move on with those that can still lead you to success? I’m convinced the moral hit would be a lot less this way and the bounce back would be faster.
I worked for a guy who referred to it as “layoff by attrition” who essentially explained that they only have a couple heads over what they predicted based on production volume, and they know the conditions at the plant aren’t nice to be in, 95° F and 50% through most of the summer in a stamping and welding shop. So instead of a tiny layoff or firing people they just wait until the people who won’t put up with the conditions on the floor take care of it themselves.
It makes the short term numbers look good. They just want to produce a spreadsheet that tells Wall Street that they cut $x million in labour costs, and don’t really care how that affects the long term health of the company.
Besides, when a corporation becomes a certain size, they don’t invest in innovation any more, they just buy a start-up that did something innovative, integrate it into their existing product and then repeat the cycle.
Capitalism is trending more and more into short term thinking, because Wall Street realised that capital can be moved at the press of a button. When a corporation is sucked dry, you load it with debt, sell your stock to retail investors, pension funds and/or the government and move on to the next opportunity.
Also known as “constructive dismissal” in many cases as well, especially if people were hired on as full-time WFH
Exactly this. My previous employer announced an end to wfm followed shortly by some people I knew getting warned that they may be laid off. But enough people quit that nobody got laid off.
That is indeed bizarre. They’re saying “zoom is no longer required”
They rather say “we don’t solve the problem”
Leading by watching asses in seats.
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.
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.
They have no confidence in their own product.
