This week was the return-to-office tipping point for Big Tech. Within the span of three days, Google, Apple and Twitter all announced new return-to-work plans, which will likely send a ripple effect across the industry as companies reevaluate how and where they want their employees to work:
- Google’s Bay Area employees have to be back in the office by April 4 in a hybrid work model. This means they’re expected to be in the office at least three days a week.
- All of Twitter’s corporate offices around the world are reopening starting March 15, although Twitter is leaving it completely up to employees to decide where they want to work. It’s the first major U.S. company to let its employees work from home forever.
- Apple’s corporate employees have to return to the office at least one day per week starting April 11. Three weeks after that, they’ll have to go in twice a week, and starting May 23, they’ll need to be in-person Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.
What’s different about this moment in time? Here are a few factors that might be part of the return-to-office calculus for HR leaders at the world’s biggest tech companies:
- Work-from-home levels are dropping, but slowly, according to research from Stanford Economics Professor Nicholas Bloom. Firms cite employee concerns over new variants, as well as the fact that, well, working from home works well, and we’ve all gotten used to it.
- Despite employee resistance and a growing cultural acceptance for work-from-home, bosses still worry about employee productivity when they can’t physically see workers sitting at their desks in the office. How many of them are hardly working, or “quitting in place,” like the underachievers profiled in this recent Insider story?
- There’s also the cost calculus: Last year, Google announced it was spending $2.1 billion to buy a Manhattan office building, around the same time as large companies like Condé Nast and JPMorgan were giving up office spaces in New York and other major cities. If you’re investing money in a space, your employees had better use it, especially if they’re bringing back the famous tech workplace amenities like massages, shuttle services and unscheduled gym time as was announced.
- Follow the leader. Let’s be real. It likely isn’t a coincidence that these companies announced their decisions in quick succession. As uncertainty over new variants and the state of COVID-19 make it impossible to truly predict how safe it is for people to go back to their offices, company leaders are looking to each other to make the first move.
Tech leaders are under no illusions. Earlier this year, Patrick Collison tweeted that 74% of Stripe’s hiring was outside of the Bay Area and Seattle, as more people shift to permanent remote work. Brian Chesky’s reply? “Yup, the place to be was Silicon Valley. It feels like now the place to be is the internet (which is everywhere).”
Even some of the biggest companies that are calling their employees back are doing so with ample qualifications, letting employees who are firm on working from home apply for extensions or even permanent exceptions to the return-to-work call. Because if Apple won’t let an engineer work from home permanently, you can bet that another firm will. And companies like Apple know it.
Proving the office is worth it
Employers are working in overdrive to prove that coming into the office is worth it for employees. They’re making offices fancier and more experience-focused to appeal to their workforce. The office of 2023 will be more like a “boutique hotel or clubhouse with technology activation throughout,” Peter Miscovich, an executive management consultant, told my colleague Allison Levitsky.
The shift back to the physical workplace has required many firms to reinvent themselves altogether to cater to the people they’re asking to commute to work several days a week. Employers are now putting a major focus on the physical organization of the office. They’re doing away with private corner offices in favor of creating spaces that prompt even more collaboration. They’re even shaking up the perks offered in the workplace. One expert called it a “rebalancing” of perks — choosing to offer what employees really need, rather than piling on plush amenities that employees might not ever use.
Source: Protocol
