Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Thu, 07 Nov 2024
Today, we’re talking about work. Specifically, where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they’re on the verge of changing yet again. For many people, the pendulum has swung wildly between working fully remote and now a push to return to the office from their bosses, and there are a lot of theories about what might really be motivating big companies to try and bring everyone back. To explain it, I caught up with two experts on the subject: Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School, and Jessica Kriegel, the chief strategy officer at workplace culture consultancy Culture Partners. We dive into what’s been happening to the nature of work today, and whether Amazon, which just announced a major return to the office five days a week, is part of a bigger trend. Links: Amazon is making its employees come back to the office five days a week | The Verge Amazon CEO denies 5-day office mandate is a ‘backdoor layoff’ | CNBC Bob Iger tells Disney employees they must return to the office four days a week | CNBC A quarter of bosses admit return-to-office mandates meant to make staff quit | Fortune More Americans now prefer hybrid over fully remote work, survey finds | Axios Google tells staff: stay productive and we’ll stay flexible | BI The list of major companies requiring employees to return to the office | BI Thinking Inside the Box: Why Virtual Meetings Generate Fewer Ideas | Columbia Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn wants you addicted to learning | Decoder Sundar Pichai on managing Google through the pandemic | Vergecast Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other props. Today we're talking about work, specifically where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they're on the verge of changing yet again.
For many people, the pendulum has swung wildly between working fully remote and now a push to return to office from their bosses. And there are a lot of theories about what might be motivating big companies to try and bring everyone back.
Here on Decoder, I've talked to lots of CEOs about the benefits of working fully remote versus hybrid or having everyone back in the office over the past several years. And I've heard the full spectrum of responses. Some executives are adamant that people need to be in the office and others are equally adamant that fully remote is the way to go.
We'll play some of those answers for you in this episode so you can get a sense of the enormous range of opinions here. If you look at the surveys, it's basically 50-50. Quite a lot of people want to work remotely, and they can be pretty loud online. But there are a lot of people, who are often quieter, who want to go back to the office for pretty good reasons.
Some folks just don't have the space to work at home, or they're simply tired of making video calls in sweatpants all day and never really leaving the house. I know some people who really like being able to just leave work at the office when they head home from the day.
And I've heard from a lot of younger people who are struggling to get face time with the more senior and experienced people at their companies in order to build relationships and grow their networks. The messy middle of all this is what quite a few companies have settled on. Hybrid work. Which allows some people to be in the office while others work remotely. This can work.
This is how The Verge runs, and I quite like it. But it's not perfect. Like so many people who work in a hybrid environment, there are days where I go into a mostly empty office and then sit on a video call. And then there are days where I realize I'm the only one at home because everyone else has gone into the office.
Figuring out how to make hybrid work is a long-term cultural project that we only really started in 2020. And while there are some obvious benefits, it's not clear if anyone's really cracked it in a way that scales across different kinds of companies. And now some companies have decided that the effort just isn't worth it.
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