SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Technology companies that brought the burden to remote work while the pandemic unfolded face a new challenge: how, when and even if they should return long-term employees to offices designed by teamwork.
“I thought this remote work period would be the hardest year and a half of my career, but it’s not,” said Brent Hyder, chief of staff at commercial software maker Salesforce and its approximately 65,000 employees worldwide. “Getting everything to start doing the way it should be is even harder.”
This transition has been complicated by the rapid spread of the delta variant, which has mixed the plans that many technology companies had to recover most of their workers near or after Labor Day weekend. Microsoft has pushed those dates back to October, while Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and a growing list of others have already decided to wait until next year.
Given how they set the tone for remote work, the return-to-office policies of technology companies are likely to have effects on other industries. Employers ’next steps could redefine how and where people work, predicts Laura Boudreau, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University who studies labor issues.
“We have gone further than making remote work a temporary thing,” Boudreau says. The longer the pandemic lasts, he says, the harder it will be to tell employees to return to the office, especially full-time.
Because they typically revolve around digital and online products, most technology jobs are tailor-made for remote jobs. Still, most major technology companies insist their employees should be prepared to work in the office two or three days a week after the pandemic ends.
The main reason: technology companies have long believed that employees grouped in a physical space will exchange ideas and generate innovations that probably would not have happened in isolation. This is one of the reasons technology titans have invested billions of dollars in corporate campuses interspersed with attractive common areas designed to lure employees from their cubicles and into “casual collisions” that turn into rainy sessions. of ideas.
But the concept of “water-cooling innovation” may be overflowing, says Christy Lake, CEO of enterprise software maker Twilio.
“There’s no data to support that really happens in real life, and yet we all subscribe to it,” Lake says. “You can’t put the elf back in the bottle and tell people, ‘You have to go back to the office or the innovation won’t pass.'”
Twilio will not return most of its nearly 6,300 employees to its offices until early next year at the earliest, and plans to allow most of them to find out how often they should enter.
This hybrid approach that allows employees to alternate between remote work and office work has been widely adopted in the technology industry, particularly among larger companies with more payroll.
Nearly two-thirds of the more than 200 companies that responded to a survey in mid-July in the technology-focused bay area, they said they expected their workers to come into the office two or three days a week. Prior to the pandemic, 70% of these employers required their workers to be in the office, according to the Bay Area Council, a business policy group that commissioned the survey.
Even Zoom, Silicon Valley’s video conferencing service that saw its revenue and stock price rise during the pandemic, says most of its employees still prefer to enter the office part of the time. “There is no single approach to getting back to the office,” wrote Kelly Steckelberg, CFO of Zoom, recently. in a blog post.
But larger technology companies, which have benefited even more than Zoom as the pandemic that made their products indispensable to many workers, don’t give employees much choice in the matter. Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have made it clear that they want most of their employees together at least a few days a week to maintain their culture and pace of innovation.
This much-worn credo seems like a backward thought to Ed Zitron, who runs a public relations firm that represents tech companies, and has been totally remote since it was launched in 2012.
He says the only reason to have an office is to satisfy managers with vested interests when it comes to grouping people “so they can look at them and feel good about the people they own … so they can enjoy this power. ”
Switching to hybrid work is ideal for people like Kelly Soderlund, a mother of two young children who works in offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto, California, for the travel management company TripActions, which has about 1,200 employees throughout the world. He could not wait to return when the company partially reopened its offices in June, in part because it lost the built-in buffer that its approximately one-hour commute provided between his personal and professional life.
“When I don’t have that, I get up in the morning, start work, and take my kids to their camp or their nursery,” Soderlund says. “And then I come back, I work and then we pick them up, we have dinner and then I go back to work. So it seems like it just works all the time. “
Soderlund believes that being together in an office leads to greater collaboration, although he also learned from the pandemic that workers do not need to be there every day for teamwork to happen.
Companionship and the need to separate work from home are one of the main reasons why employees of enterprise software maker Adobe Software cite to return to the office, said Gloria Chen, CEO of one of the companies oldest in Silicon Valley. Working from home “is here to stay, but we also continue to value the people who come together,” he said.
The pandemic transition should allow smaller technology companies to adopt more flexible work-from-home policies that can help them attract high-level engineers from other companies more insistent on having people in the office, says Boudreau, an academic from Columbia University.
“Labor markets are relatively tight now, so employees have more bargaining chips than they had in a while,” Boudreau says.
Ankur Dahiya, who launched his RunX software launch last year during the pandemic closures, believes remote work has helped him hire employees who might otherwise not have been candidates. The eight-employee startup rents an office in San Francisco one day a week so Dahiya can meet with employees who live nearby, but other employees are in Canada, Nevada and Oregon. Workers living outside of California have been flying once every three months to hold “super productive” meetings and brainstorm, says Dahiya, who has previously worked on Facebook and Twitter.
“I’ve worked in offices for the last ten years and I know there’s been a lot of time lost,” Dahiya says, recalling all the random conversations, long meetings, meaningless wanderings, and other alterations that seem to occur in these environments.
Twilio’s Lake hopes the remote work experience will also transform employee behavior in the office once they return. He hopes the remote experience has given employees the opportunity to better understand how their equipment works.
“I think more than anything it will make us more intentional about when, why and how we meet,” he says.
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