Zoom wants a hybrid model after becoming a symbol of the home office – 08/08/2023 – Market

In the first few months of the pandemic, a certain company suddenly went from relative obscurity to the kind of popularity that has made it a noun, a verb, and a catchphrase.

“Can you open a Zoom for us?”

“Let’s Zoom.”

“I have Zoom fatigue.”

The videoconferencing company’s revenue soared in 2020 — a jump driven by millions of people switching to working from home. Zoom has also been part of the shift to remote work it has promoted, with most of its employees allowed to work from home.

But now, joining a slew of other tech companies pushing for face-to-face work, Zoom is requiring many of its 7,400 employees to report back to the office.

Last week, the company asked all employees within a 50-mile radius of an office to work part-time in person, a plan Zoom said it would roll out in August and September.

“We believe that a structured hybrid approach – meaning employees who live close to an office must be on site two days a week to interact with their teams – is most effective for Zoom,” said a company spokesperson. “We will continue to leverage the full Zoom platform to keep our employees and dispersed teams connected and working efficiently.”

During a tense meeting last week about the return-to-office policy, held over the Zoom app, CEO Eric Yuan faced a barrage of questions from employees who voiced frustration at the time and money they would be wasting commuting, according to an employee. who was at the meeting but was not authorized to speak publicly about internal company matters.

In 2020, Zoom daily meeting attendees jumped to over 300 million from 10 million the year before, making it the most downloaded free iPhone app of the year. But the company has struggled to maintain its pandemic-era growth. In February, amid a wave of layoffs in the tech industry, Zoom cut 15% of its staff, about 1,300 people. The company’s workforce grew by more than 275% between July 2019 and October 2022.

On a conference call in May, Yuan said he was confident about the future of workplace flexibility and the benefits it has brought his company. “I think hybrid work will continue,” he said.

Zoom, like many other tech companies, still retains some flexibility, requiring its employees to work in the office only part-time.

Levels of hybrid and remote work remain far above what they were pre-pandemic. In July, nearly a third of full-time workers in the United States were working in a hybrid mode, spending some days working from home and others in an office, according to researchers at Stanford University.

But dozens of companies have joined Zoom to tighten their office attendance policies this summer as offices remain at just under half pre-pandemic occupancy levels.

Google, which asked employees to come into the office three days a week, announced that managers will be able to consider unexcused absences from the office when conducting performance reviews, and use badge logs to identify those absences. Salesforce, taking a softer approach, said it would make a charitable donation of $10 a day on behalf of any employee who came into the office for a 10-day period in June.

Many companies have faced strong resistance when calling people back to the office. Hundreds of Amazon corporate employees walked off the job for an hour in May, protesting the company’s announcement that they must return to the office at least three days a week. At Apple, corporate employees signed petitions protesting their return to the office.

At the start of the pandemic, the tech industry was quick to embrace flexible working, which was made possible by the industry’s own products, including Slack (owned by Salesforce), Gmail and Zoom.

But many of these companies realized that they didn’t want their employees to remain permanently dispersed. Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford and an expert on hybrid work, said the tech industry’s move back to the office was not a surprise, given how much these companies spend on commercial real estate.

Bloom said Zoom, for example, had all the downsides of fully remote working — some employees feeling disconnected — without the company seeing its financial advantages, such as saving money on office space, because the company was still paying for real estate and employees in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“They’re paying for their office and hiring local staff so they don’t have any advantages in being completely remote,” Bloom said. “The most surprising thing to me was that it took them so long to formally announce this.”

Recent studies have confirmed some benefits of face-to-face work. A working paper released this year by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Iowa and Harvard University found that at one tech company, remote work decreased the amount of feedback junior employees received about their performance. . Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that remote working at MIT led to a 38% decline in “weak ties,” the loose connections that help encourage people’s careers.

Still, more than 90% of workers who can do their jobs remotely now want some flexibility in the workplace, according to Gallup.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves