Why Amazon, Disney, and others are pushing workers back to the office

Today, we are talking about work. In particular, where we work, how our expectations of working remotely have been dramatically changed by the covid-19 pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they’re about to change again. For many people, the pendulum has swung between working remotely completely and now pushing back into the office for their bosses, and there are many theories about what might motivate large companies to try to bring everyone back.

Here it continues DecoderI’ve talked to a lot of CEOs about the benefits of working entirely remotely versus hybrid or bringing everyone back into the office over the past few years, and I’ve heard a lot of answers. Some managers insist that people need to be in the office, while others insist that being completely remote is the way to go. We’ll play some of those answers for you as we go along so you can get an idea of ​​the huge range of ideas here.

If you look at the surveys, it’s actually 50/50 – most people want to work remotely, and they’re not too loud online. But there are many people, often silent, who want to go back to the office for very good reasons. Some people just don’t have the space to work from home, or they’re just tired of making video calls in hot pants all day and never actually leaving the house. I know some people who really like to just leave work at the office when they come home for the day, and I’ve heard from many young people who have trouble dealing with older and more experienced people. their companies to build relationships and grow their networks.

The messy atmosphere of all this is what few companies are based on: hybrid work, which allows for a combination of office work and remote work. Here is the way The Verge it runs, and I like it – but it’s not perfect. Like many people who work in a hybrid environment, there are days when I walk into an empty office and sit on Zoom in the phone booth, and there are days when I realize I’m the only one in a meeting sitting at home because everyone else has gone into the office.

Figuring out how to do hybrid work is a long-term cultural activity that only started in 2020. Although there are some obvious advantages, it is not clear that anyone has ever broken it down in a way that includes different types of companies.

Now, some companies have decided that the nuance is not worth it. In September, Amazon mandated that all workers return to the office five days a week starting in January. In a memo announcing the change, CEO Andy Jassy said the company “realized that it’s easier to learn, model, adapt, and strengthen our culture,” and that “collaboration, negotiation, and innovation are easier and more effective,” and that. “teams tend to communicate better with each other” when everyone is in the office.

Amazon isn’t alone in wanting workers to return to their desks. Companies like Disney and Salesforce have also pushed for workers to return to the office at least four days a week, making similar arguments. Some companies, like Apple, have been pushing workers to come back for a long time – that new office space in Cupertino was not built to stay empty.

But is going back to the office all about building a company culture and being creative and productive? I have to tell you, there is a big plot The Verge again Decoder an audience that is absolutely convinced that any major back-to-office policy change is actually just a cover-up – we get emails making this case almost every time one of these is announced.

Jassy even addressed this directly, a few days ago, at an all-hands meeting. In response to claims that the mandate to return to work was to cite “household layoffs,” he told workers that was not true. We’ll come back to that later.

So I wanted to know what was going on, what the real reasons were for going back to the office, and where all of this was headed next. To explain it, I met with two experts on the subject: Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School, and Jessica Kriegel, chief strategy officer at cultural consulting firm Cultural Partners.

We dive into what’s happening in the workplace today, and you’ll hear them both lay out some of the key reasons they’re back in the office. We’re also trying to figure out if Amazon is just an outlier or, as you’ll hear Jessica say, the “tip of the spear” in what could be a much bigger thing.

Here are some of the stories, polls, and lessons we discussed in this episode, if you’d like to read more:

• Amazon makes its employees return to the office five days a week | The Verge
• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy denies 5-day mandate is ‘doorstepping’ | CNBC
• Bob Iger tells Disney employees to return to the office four days a week | CNBC
• A quarter of managers agree to go back to the office, which is intended to make workers quit | Good luck
• Many Americans now prefer a hybrid instead of a completely remote job, finds a survey | Axios
• Google tells employees: stay productive and we’ll stay flexible | Business Insider
• List of major companies that need employees to return to the office | Business Insider
• Thinking Inside the Box: Why Virtual Meetings Generate Fewer Ideas | Columbia
• Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn wants you to be addicted to reading Decoder
• Zoom CEO wants AI clones in meetings | Decoder
• Sundar Photosi in managing Google with this disease | The Vergecast