What Barrett Kime’s boss said in a recent video was very direct. Could his team members at NBCUniversal show up at the office at least for the few days a week they were supposed to be there?
And what came next was a rebellion. Kime, senior creative director, turned on his microphone. “I told him it was crazy to ask people to come to the office more often in the midst of Covid,” he recalled.
Others of his colleagues intervened to explain the reasons why they couldn’t go back to the office: taking care of their children, the rise in fuel prices, the contagion rates by Covid-19.
For Kime, the moment marked a new phase in the dialogue about returning to the office.
“It’s kind of a Wizard of Oz thing,” Kime said. In other words, his team realized that there was no almighty being that forced them to attend — simply a man behind a curtain (or Zoom screen).
“As much as we grumbled about needing to go back to work, we all knew it was going to happen. But the minute we started back, we realized how silly that was,” he added.
Optimism about plans to return to the office is slowly fading in most cities and economic sectors across the United States. When asked in early 2021 what proportion of their workers would return to work in the office five days a week in the future, executives answered that 50%. Now, the share has dropped to 20%, according to a recent survey by the consulting group Gartner.
Office occupancy across the country peaked last month, with 43% of workers in attendance, and then Covid-19 spiked again, according to data from Kastle, a security company.
The vast majority of Americans, especially those working in the service sector and low-paying jobs, continued to work face-to-face during the pandemic. But those who were able to work remotely clung to the flexibility they had gained. In a survey conducted in January, the Pew Research Center found that 60% of workers whose jobs can be performed from home wanted to work remotely all or most of the time.
“What is abundantly clear is that there are fewer and fewer companies that expect their workers to be in the office five days a week,” said Brian Kropp, vice president of human resources at Gartner. “Even some of the biggest companies that publicly declared they wanted their workers back in the office five days a week are starting to back down.”
That’s the case with Apple, which recently lifted its requirement that workers return to the office at least three days a week. And McKinsey, which at some point intends to establish clearer norms about face-to-face work, to ensure that people realize the value of collaborating in person, but for now it continues to allow individuals to enter into agreements with their bosses and clients about to their working hours, according to the consultancy’s head of human resources.
Google has delayed its planned return to the office in January, and now about 10% of its workers have been allowed to work remotely full-time or move to other cities. Intuit at one point considered a rigid return-to-the-office plan for its 11,500 workers in the United States, but instead allowed managers and teams to set their own expectations for what days they should be present.
“Being prescriptive creates all sorts of bureaucracy, because then you have to get down the hierarchy and everything depends on rules,” said Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit’s chief executive. “We don’t believe that a person needs to be in the office 40 hours a week, but neither do we believe that all work should be virtual.”
RTO’s plans were like a gigantic game of bluff. Executives ordered workers to return to the office but had to postpone the date as Covid-19 cases continued to rise. Business leaders accepted this uncertainty, hoping it was temporary. Until it became clear that it wasn’t. Workers were able to stay at home longer, and this gave them more freedom to test the rigidity of their bosses’ orders. Now, some companies continue to wait for staff to return, but they have lost the power of pressure they had in this regard, due to the constant change of dates.
“What we decided to do was ask what was working,” said Joan Burke, vice president of human resources at DocuSign, who pushed back the date for her people to return to the office four times before deciding it would not require mandatory attendance for now. “Let’s learn from what’s working and put protections in place if we think something doesn’t work.”
Some executives hoped that if they convinced their subordinates to spend more time at the office, people would remember that, despite not seeming to remember the fact, they once enjoyed going to work.
Christina Ross, chief executive of Cube, a software company with 75 employees, used to enjoy working in the office. Before the pandemic, she hired an engineer who lived in Texas and insisted he move to New York to do his job. She couldn’t imagine building a long-term relationship with a subordinate she didn’t see in person.
Now she sets her company to “remote first.” She briefly toyed with the idea of demanding a return to the Cube office, but decided instead to create incentives for people to return by choice. She even arranged for a change of address to the New York office in order to make the journey easier for workers coming from Brooklyn.
“People voted with their feet in favor of not necessarily coming back,” Ross said. “It can be disappointing when you try so hard to create a welcoming environment in the office and people choose not to come.”
Some business leaders have taken tougher positions. Elon Musk, for example, told SpaceX and Tesla employees that they would have to spend at least 40 hours a week in the office, on pain of being fired. Many other companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have taken a more lenient approach, offering beers, snacks, gifts and drinks to lure their people back. But those incentives have limits, and few companies seem willing to resort to punishment.
“It almost sounds like a meme about the 2018 office – we have bagels, food, ping pong tables,” Ross said. “But that’s not enough of an argument for people to take the commute from home to the office.”
Many companies are coming to terms with the reality that demanding a return to the office could be a contrast to rival companies and lead to them losing talent. In some industries, and in some areas of the United States, an office-centric culture is becoming an eccentricity rather than the norm.
Other executives insist on full payback, convinced of the value of having their people in the office five days a week. Tom Siebel, chief executive of C3 AI, an artificial intelligence company that has 800 employees, demanded the full return of his staff to the office in June 2021. He said that requirement only made the company more attractive, to certain job candidates. jobs.
“For people who want to work from home via Zoom, there are companies that like that,” he said. “Look for a job on Facebook. Look for a job on Salesforce.”
Siebel said it had “the only crowded parking lot in Silicon Valley,” and considers that a competitive advantage. “It’s not possible to invent self-landing rockets by working through Zoom chats once a week,” he added. “We have to get together in a room, with whiteboards, and fail, and fail, and fail, until we succeed.”
But for those executives who didn’t make return mandatory, broader questions arose about the future of the offices. One example is Manny Medina, chief executive of Outreach, an artificial intelligence company applied to sales that has about 600 employees in Seattle, most of whom are encouraged to spend at least 40% of their work time in the office. Speaking in an almost empty office, Medina said he has grown accustomed to rebutting objections from his staff about the value of face-to-face collaboration.
Recently, a novice worker attended a virtual meeting with the president and said he didn’t understand why the company could force him to go to the office, when working from home allowed him to juggle his social life, work, and his jiu training. -jitsu.
“I replied that his argument was fair, and that he should think about his priorities,” Medina said. “If you want to be an MMA fighter, do it.”
Translation by Paulo Migliacci
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
