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After more than two years of trying to lure workers back to offices, bosses are losing patience.
The days of luring employees with free food, laundry service and yoga classes are largely over. Now leaders are resorting to threats — and that’s forcing some workers to decide whether they’re willing to give up the flexibility they’ve grown accustomed to.
Even tech companies that were once advocates of remote work are changing their tune. Zoom, whose video conferencing tool helped enable the rapid transition to remote work during the pandemic, recently asked employees who live within 50 miles of a Zoom office to check in at least twice a week. Facebook parent company Meta recently revised its return-to-the-office guidelines, telling employees that they could be terminated if they fail to show up at least three days a week starting September 5.
At Amazon, remote workers must decide whether to relocate or leave their jobs, with some facing significantly higher living costs. At a recent meeting, CEO Andy Jassy was blunt: “If you can’t commit to going back to the office three days a week,” Jassy said, “it probably won’t work out for you at Amazon.”
The new push for face-to-face work represents a major shift, with leaders directly acknowledging the model’s challenges – in some cases saying productivity has declined and citing fewer opportunities for spontaneous collaboration, mentoring and connection-building. Employers now have new leverage as the job market has cooled, leaving workers with less choice.
“The pendulum has shifted, it’s no longer just employees who have all the power,” said Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures, a Toronto-based venture fund that works with early-stage companies across North America. The majority of start-up companies Founders he works with require employees to be in the office a few days a week, although there is resistance.
“During the pandemic, many salespeople took calls from mountaintops while on hiking trips,” Cohen said. “This doesn’t work anymore.”
Zoom spokeswoman Danielle Stickler said a structured hybrid approach would be most effective for the company, adding that it would “better enable Zoom to leverage our own technologies.” Meta’s return-to-the-office policy requires teams to prioritize time together to foster strong collaboration and a vibrant culture, said spokesman Dave Arnold.
Amazon offers “relocation assistance” to employees who are asked to relocate and who make up “a relatively small percentage” of the workforce, although it did not elaborate on what that assistance entails.
“Since we started working together at least three days a week, there has been more energy, collaboration and connection,” said Amazon spokesman Rob Munoz. “We heard that from many employees and the companies around our offices.”
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)
Despite millions of workers across the country being asked to return to their offices, office occupancy has remained relatively stable over the past year. The country’s top 10 metro areas averaged 47.2 percent of pre-pandemic levels last week, according to data from Kastle Systems. This time last year the average was around 44 percent.
The sluggish return has angered leaders from city halls to the Oval Office as downtowns struggle to recover from the pandemic. President Biden recently urged Cabinet officials to urge their staff to return to offices in the fall as downtown D.C. struggles to regain pre-pandemic commuter traffic. (A July report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office showed that 17 of 24 federal agencies had average building occupancy of 25 percent or less.)
According to data from Gallup, about 52 percent of U.S. workers who can work remotely work under hybrid arrangements, while 29 percent work exclusively remotely. And although executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have argued that the increase in flexible work has had a negative impact on productivity, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that labor productivity rose 3.7 percent in the second quarter of 2023 and compared increased by 1.3 percent at the same time last year.
While employers tout the collaborative benefits of being together in person, most hybrid arrangements don’t foster the connections bosses want, according to Rob Cross, an associate professor of management at Babson College, who studies how different companies collaborate using surveys. Email and meeting data. He has found that mandates for a certain number of days in office fail “because you don’t get the right people to work together.”
“What we see is more successful when companies use some form of analytics” to determine which workers need to come in on the same days, Cross said. He estimates that only about 5 percent of organizations take this approach. “Leaders are just saying, ‘We need water-cooler moments,'” Cross said. “They don’t look and say, ‘These are the interactions we need to encourage.’ ”
Cisco is trying the team-based approach. According to Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco, the technology company “gives each team autonomy” to decide how and when to work. The goal, says Patel, is to “get people excited” about coming into the office to interact with their colleagues without overloading them or limiting their ability to concentrate on work – something that’s difficult in an age of increasing numbers of Zoom meetings is difficult.
“Video has become a very transactional means of communication,” Patel said, adding that the flood of meetings results in “no walking time,” which can be stressful for employees.
Software company Workday also faced an “avalanche of activity” during the return to the office, according to Ashley Goldsmith, the company’s chief people officer. The majority of the company’s employees spend half their time each quarter in a Workday office or on-site with a customer, prospect or other external partner. Workday also recently launched a program that allows employees to work from anywhere for up to 30 days a year.
“We noticed that various teams were struggling with work overload, in part due to the shift to hybrid work and changing priorities, resulting in a meeting-heavy schedule,” Goldsmith said. “Collaboration overload was particularly pronounced among our top performers.”
When it comes to office time, workers are looking for “elevated experiences that they can’t get at home,” said Chase Garbarino, CEO of workplace software company HqO. Free food, great tools and attractive workspaces are a big draw, but HqO’s data shows that “the number one thing people want from a workplace is concentration space,” Garbarino said.
“You’re not going to put them in a place that’s designed just for social interaction,” Garbarino said. “You have to be able to concentrate.”
For workers who value flexibility, the shift to in-office work is unwelcome. Loreen Targos, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency in Chicago, had triplets last summer. The ability to do her work remotely gave the 37-year-old some relief in her transition back to work. During meetings, she often left the camera to express milk or breastfeed without missing any discussions. She had to do head-to-head work between naps and feeding times.
A year later, Targos said she found it difficult to care for three toddlers, despite the help of her husband and a nanny, but she enjoyed being around whenever her babies needed her. As President Biden calls for federal workers to return to their offices this fall, she may soon have to endure a two-hour drive through Chicago rush hour and revise her child care plan — or consider a more drastic change.
“It might just be worth quitting my job and trying to find work where I can be more flexible with them,” Targos said.
Still, finding remote work is becoming increasingly difficult. According to Nick Bunker, head of North American economic research at Indeed Hiring Lab, about 8 percent of all job postings now promote remote or hybrid work. That’s down from 9.7 percent last year, he said, but still a significant increase above pre-pandemic levels.
Dominique Joseph, an EPA spokesman, said the agency will “continue to follow OMB guidance, listen to staff feedback and monitor performance metrics as the agency continues to prioritize its mission to protect human health and the environment.” as she returns to office.
For Greg Galant, CEO of Muck Rack, a public relations software company, it was “frustrating” to see some executives rejecting remote work. Muck Rack moved out of its offices during the pandemic and Galant said the move had a positive impact on employee well-being and productivity.
The company is now investing energy and resources that once went into stocking offices with coffee and snacks and setting operating hours to create intentional (and less frequent) opportunities for employees to meet in person. For International Coworking Day on August 9, the company rented co-working spaces and organized happy hours in nearly a dozen cities across the country. About 75 employees – about a quarter of the company’s workforce – were in attendance.
“People are excited to go in and be together if they’re not forced to,” Galant said. He believes many companies have written off remote work without seriously trying it. “I hope more people see the potential here and don’t just follow the narrative of returning to office.
Caroline O’Donovan contributed to this report.