When the coronavirus pandemic was at its worst, many people who worked from home and had a meeting at 9:15 a.m. would get up at 9:00 a.m. As the pandemic faded around the world, offices slowly started to reopen and employees were called back to work. In the tech world, too, top CEOs like Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Marck Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and others, called their employees back to the office. This was easier said than done, though, because employees didn’t want to go back to work.
At a recent event put on by fintech company Stripe, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was quoted as saying that the “work from home experiment” is over and that tech companies that rushed to announce permanent work from home made “a big mistake.”
More and more companies are now making it mandatory for employees to work from offices. Here’s a look at how the top tech CEOs have called employees back to work.
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In March of last year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the employees back to the office and told them that the company would be using a “hybrid” work model that would let employees work from home a few days a week.
Soon after this was said, news came out that some Google contract workers had said “no” to working from home. Reports say that about 200 contract workers sent out a petition to keep working from home, saying that some of them “could not afford to commute.”
Amazon
In a blog post, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, wrote about the benefits of working from an office. In the same post, the CEO said that Amazon workers will have to come to the office at least three days a week beginning in May 2023.
“We made this decision at an S-team meeting earlier this week, and I wanted to share it with you as soon as possible for a number of reasons, including the fact that I know some of our employees will have to make changes,” the post said.
Amazon recently let go of tens of thousands of workers. Employees are now planning to protest the company’s rule that they can’t work from home and its plan to lay off a lot of people. The Washington Post said that Amazon workers plan to walk off the job on May 31 to show their displeasure. Reports say that the employees are upset about both the company’s “return-to-office” policy and the mass layoffs.
“Amazon has to keep up with a world that is always changing. We need real plans to deal with our impact on the environment and flexible work options if we want to create a diverse, world-class workplace “The group of protesters said this on Twitter.
Meta
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is also planning to ask employees to work from offices again soon. During a meeting in April of this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company won’t completely take away the option to work from home, but it will look into other options if “conditions don’t improve.”
“I want to make it clear right away that we won’t stop all remote work or anything else like that. My impression is that teams still don’t work together in the office as much as I would hope and expect would be best, and we’re also starting to get some data that suggests we should be doing more there “Insider reported what Zuckerberg had said.
In an earlier email, the CEO of Meta also said that, on average, people who work in an office do a better job than those who work from home.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has made it clear that he doesn’t like working from home. As soon as he became CEO of Twitter in 2022, he got rid of the option for employees to work from home.
People started calling Musk “Karen Musk” on Reddit after the Twitter CEO criticised work from home in an interview and said it was “morally wrong.”
In an interview with CNBC, Musk had said, “Silicon Valley’s ‘laptop classes’ need to get off their’moral high horse’ with their work-from-home bulls***.”
He had also said that he thought the idea of working from home was like the fake Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.”
Apple
Last year, an Apple worker made headlines when he quit his job after the company made it a requirement for all employees to work from offices. Ian Goodfellow, who was in charge of machine learning and artificial intelligence at Apple, quit and said that the company didn’t have a “flexible work environment and policies.” Goodfellow is said to have joined Google because its rules were less strict at the time he quit his job.
In March of last year, Apple said that people will no longer be able to work from home.
TCS
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will also stop letting its employees work from home in September 2022. The company told its workers in an email that they had to work from the office at least “three days a week.” In the email, the managers were asked to put together a roster.
“Sticking to the schedule is a must, and it will be kept track of… Those who don’t follow the rules will be taken seriously, and administrative actions may be taken “the message said.
In an interview with Financial Express in January of this year, N. Ganapathy Subramaniam, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of TCS, said, “People who have joined us in the last two years are more aware of how much more they can get done by coming to the office. When they visit the office, they get a different view of TCS and a different idea of where they stand in comparison to their peers.”
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