The tech firm whose name became synonymous with doing work/school/whatever else from home is ordering full time work from home by its own employees to cease.
Zoom Video Communications, which was at the forefront of the remote working revolution during the coronavirus pandemic, is telling its employees to report to its offices on a more regular basis.
Staff at the San Jose, California-based company who live within 80km from a Zoom office are now required to work from there at least twice a week, Business Insider reported, quoting a company representative.
“We believe that a structured hybrid approach – meaning employees that live near an office need to be on-site two days a week to interact with their teams – is most effective for Zoom,” the representative said.
Zoom has not released any statement regarding the apparent decision.
The move is a U-turn from Zoom’s stance last year, when it said fewer than 2 per cent of its entire workforce would work remotely.
Remote work rose to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic and was part of the change companies had to adapt to to stay afloat.
And with work-related technologies – most notably videoconferencing, which is not new but was of great use during the crisis – improving and more widely available, the situation has highlighted that work and other activities can be done remotely.
Zoom found itself at the forefront thanks to its easy-to-use and flexible platform. The word “zoom” also became a verb for videoconferencing.
Technology played a key role in advancing the use of remote work, with companies – especially cloud service providers, telecom operators and other tech-focused organisations – boosting their offerings to support the growing demand for digital services.
Remote working has also brought a number of benefits to the forefront, including work-life balance, less commuting, location independence, increased productivity and monetary savings, according to US company FlexJobs.
However, there have also been disadvantages. This week, a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles found that workers randomly assigned to work from home full-time are 18 per cent less productive than those in the office.
The researchers, who studied newly hired data entry workers in India who were randomly assigned to either the home or the office, said that two thirds of the drop in productivity was evident from the first day of work.
Zoom’s Sam Tayan on the new era for work – Business ExtraZoom’s Sam Tayan on the new era for work – Business Extra
It is also a bane for the office space market in major cities, which is at risk of losing about $800 billion by 2030 as vacancies rise amid people opting for remote or flexible working arrangements, a study from McKinsey & Co showed last month.While office attendance has stabilised and recovered slightly following the Covid-19 pandemic, it is still 30 per cent below pre-pandemic levels, the global consultancy said.
Unsurprising. Too many managers can’t figure out how to manage, much less lead, without people in physical touching distance. Plus if everyone really does work from home then what do we do with all the empty offices and the businesses that serve them (the dry cleaners, lunch cafe’s etc.Report
Plus if everyone really does work from home then what do we do with all the empty offices and the businesses that serve them (the dry cleaners, lunch cafe’s etc.
Why would employers care about that? If they could maintain the same level of productivity, they’d love not to have to renew the leases on their offices. And why would they care whether dry cleaners or restaurants make money?
Sure, the building owners care about being able to rent out their office buildings, and restaurant owners care about having customers, but they’re not the ones making the decisions about whether white collar workers can work from home.Report
My employer cares very much about that.Report
Yes, fine, but the government is the exception here, not the rule. Private-sector employers are not able to seize a cut of the profits of commercial landlords and restaurateurs, and have no incentive to spend money to prop up those industries.Report
Government’s good at giving incentives. My “non-profit” employer, for example, doesn’t pay tax to the local government. The local government’s willingness to not challenge the “non-profit” status may hinge on “how many people do you put in offices downtown or in Oakland.”Report
“This week, a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles found that workers randomly assigned to work from home full-time are 18 per cent less productive than those in the office.”
My productivity has increased dramatically as a full time WFH employee (I go in once a month). Why? Don’t have people stopping by on the pretext of some issue and bitching about stuff for 30 mins before they get to the point. Also, no one in the facility has an office. Cubes with low walls almost guarantee a noisy environment and I need to think.Report
Bingo.Report
My experience at our company has been that when we shifted to WFH, the people who are naturally productive became a little to a lot more productive, the people who were average slid back a little, and the people who were below average got a lot worse with no one looking over their shoulder. But I’m at a small company with hardly any pure managers and not a lot of repetitive, predictable work — pretty easy to game if you’re the kind of person to do that.Report
I think you’re right and I can envision some real difficulties with people new to the work force and then the floor just falling out on the people who suck at life, especially in bigger departments.
Still, I tend to doubt these ‘studies’ that have started to come out. My gut is that for a lot of bosses it’s really a combination of 3 things: sad they lost their panopticon, sad they lost their social life, which consisted solely of inane office chatter, and sad about eating huge overhead on expensive unused office space under leases predating the pandemic.Report
A few months ago there was an article in Vox about employed people that basically are so overlooked, they do nothing at work.Report
The description of this study makes me wonder if they’re seeing the same thing I am, a failure/inability to train new staff. That’s not the only problem my office has seen over the past three years, but it’s one of the more glaring ones.Report
Tease this out for us – what training of new staff needs to be done on site?Report
At my last full-time gig on the budget staff for the Colorado legislature, the committee room practice. Various statutory and state constitutional restrictions meant the committee meetings would still be done there, pandemic or not. Briefings and other staff presentations, plus staffing an appropriations committee, were not things you wanted to do without some practice in the actual setting.Report
true. I can see it for some legislative functions, but here on the executive side, not so much . . . .Report
It’s the 20 things a day that come up that an experienced officemate or supervisor can help you with. Someone looking over your shoulder and saying “check your drive mapping; I know what the documentation says, but check your drive mapping”.Report
Fair enough, but that’s not a universal training need across industries. And its a thing that can be addressed digitally with planning, concentration and emphasis.Report
It could be, yeah. But it’s a new task, and the old people don’t know they know these things, and the new people don’t know of them.Report
Your office might want to spend some time capturing how the old people do things – its good succession planning. Not that my agency is in any way a shining light on this.Report
“Good Succession Planning” is extremely poor security. You know you work for REAL security when the initial documentation is just plain wrong, and the improved (harder to find) documentation is deliberately sabotaged.Report
And in support of the in-person-is-better idea, “check your drive mapping” is the sort of solution that a remote worker would need to do a lot of Zooming around to find, whereas an office worker would probably get some advice very quickly. So there is that.
A smart manager would balance that against morale degradation and resulting turnover acceleration and probably come up with “hybridize it.” But maybe that’s just me.Report
Getting the balance right is critical. To me there is a fundamental assumption that this kind of coaching and performance management is naturally just happening by virtue of being in the same building. However my experience is that there are all kinds of reasons that isn’t the case. Among them is that most managers aren’t necessarily good managers, they’re high performers that were promoted into the role and may or may not be any good at it.
So for those that aren’t great at management to begin with remote just makes a bad situation worse. On the other hand if you are, there’s no reason you can’t have occasional in person touch points, maybe preceded by a heavier touch, in person ramp up process. Now in fairness legal departments tend to be small, but it’s always been perfectly easy for me to tell who is working and who isn’t and/or who needs help and who doesn’t regardless of whether it’s remote or in person. When there’s a problem you jump on it, but it does require good interpersonal skills and initiative. On the other hand if you lack that stuff and you’re only in charge because you’re the most skilled in the room well… suddenly no one knows what’s going on or how to fix it.
Really there’s a larger issue at least in corporate America about management being a lost art. Companies don’t really take the time to train or grow people into it or provide the support needed to do it well. It’s just sink or swim and the people downstream of that end up just as stunted by the (lack of) approach.Report
Every workplace is different, so I don’t discount your take. And we may be talking about the same thing anyway. Quite often, it’s the experienced staffer rather than the manager who passes along the practical tips and tricks. Our problem is that the new staff are only receiving formal training from the supervisors.Report
That is indeed a problem – the management training I’ve had over the years (most of which I sought on my own) wasn’t directed at providing formal training, but informal mentoring and coaching. Which is different.
I agree this is what happens in the vast majority of cases. And its that knowledge that corporations and government agencies fail to capture before people leave or retire. Which I view as a massive lost opportunity.Report
They definitely aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities. Where I’ve seen struggles its been concentrated in the really big departments. The commonality I’ve noticed though is that those departments weren’t structured or run very well in the before times either. Typically they’ve had way too many individuals nominally reporting to someone who can’t possibly be overseeing them all, no apparent chain of command, that kind of thing.
Maybe in person, having self selecting personnel ad hoc supporting others, plus everyone’s obligation to at least show their face every day was what was getting them by.Report
There’s been a study done on this, though my initial googling has not rustled it up, in summary work from home mildly boosts your top producers and mildly dampens your average producers but it royally fishes over inexperienced employees- without being jammed in with more vets they learn and develop a LOT more slowly.Report
To me there has to be a fair compromise with maybe more in person but also a lot more flexibility about how often. Obviously my role is a bit different but nothing chaps my ass more than hearing about how it’s somehow necessary I go back to losing 90 minutes a day commuting but also still being expected to answer calls and generally monitoring texts and email 24/7. The laptop/smart phone combo and how impossible it’s become to truly leave the office really has to be accounted for. Or so I think. I’d be more sympathetic to something that was at least more forward thinking about how the world has changed over the last 10 years.Report
I hear you, I’m 100% remote and still pinch myself and wonder if I’m not dreaming. I can only assume that at some point there’ll be a retrenching but I also think employers are dreaming if they think they can stuff the remote work genie back into the bottle- certainly not as long as the labor market remains tight.Report
Ultimately it’s going to come down to whether it’s worth more for employers to have employees in the office or for employees to be able to work from home. Contrary to histrionic lefty rhetoric, employers can’t actually force people to do anything. Employers that require working in office have to compete with employers who allow full-time WFH, which means that they’ll have to pay enough of a premium to overcome workers’ preference to work from home. And they’ll only do that if they think it’s actually worth paying the premium.Report
At least in the legal industry, new lawyers need a lot of guiding help in doing stuff that can’t really be done on line. Like watching how to prepare clients, do trials, write motions, briefs, etc.Report
My training for my most recent job was entirely on the company computer. HR, ethics, workplace safety, sexual harassment, yadda yadda. For the last, say 15-20 years, annual “training” as a current employee was entirely online for all my employers, even pre covid.Report
The only thing you can’t easily “train” online is company/workplace culture, though I’d expect that would be changing anyway post-COVID in many places.Report
Agreed.Report
This has started making the rounds:
If I read this correctly, I shouldn’t be discussing the stuff my boss and I are hoping to patent over Zoom? Like, Zoom is entitled to that?Report
I love how “X” no longer allows you to read comments to a Tweet – and how the website is still Twitter.comReport
I completed in 7 days a full push to production of a very simple bit of code with the newest intern. All done remotely. As a benefit to remote-work, the “very simple bit of code” was a training that I could open up to “anyone who’s free.”
You lose a little, in terms of “not seeing someone’s face” — but if you’re on the phone with them, and showing them your screen — and then watching as they do it on their screen, you’re pretty good.Report