Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Did some companies really go back to the office100%? We sure did not, going to the office is more of a social thing, maybe for all hands meetings, customer presentations and that kind of stuff.
The company wins because they can have a shiny office in the city that does not need to have workplaces for all employees but maybe 20% of them at a time.
With all the weird stuff that people do at home, productivity is still higher. In times of crunch working from home has saved me more than once. Etc blabla is this really still a discussion nowadays?
I think it’s been proven time and time again that return to office mandates are a way to avoid severance packages. People end up leaving voluntarily. In the age of tens of thousands of layoffs at all the big tech companies this has to have saved them thousands of salaries worth of compensation packages.
They don’t care about the “quality” of workers because if someone is truly important they get exceptions, everyone else is imminently replaceable.
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How do you work the office only having space for 20% of employees? Makes a lot of sense but would be annoying to hot desk. My office only has us in two days a week but has not cut down on the number of desks at all, giving up the potential savings.
You book a desk in an online tool a week in advance or so. Not sure I get the question. Maybe it’s 30% I made that number up.
I think you got it and effectively answered it, thanks.
If the company grows they don’t need to have desks for every new person, so they won’t run out of space as quickly, saving the cost of relocating to a bigger office for further down the road.
My last two companies have been mostly fully remote, we’ve done all hands meetings, we’ve done regular scheduled meetings, and everything in between all remotely. It works well, employees are happier and we produce better work as a result.
We do a day a week just to catch up and remember how to speak.
We might occasionally have to come in for a few days if the owner is in the country. That’s like once or twice a year.
I was asked how I felt about coming back full time and I told them straight. There’s lots of places that don’t demand that, and they pay more than we do. Don’t lose good staff to nonsense policy.