Former Google CEO and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is reportedly not a fan of remote work.
Speaking to students at Stanford University, Schmidt said that Google’s offering of remote work has caused it to fall behind in the artificial intelligence (AI) competition, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday (Aug. 14), citing a video of the event.
“Google has decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt said, according to the report.
Schmidt also told the students that if they want to launch a startup, they must require employees to work in an office because successful startups “work like hell,” per the report.
Google has been stepping up its efforts to get employees to work in the office, saying in 2022 that they would be back in the office three days a week, and adding in 2023 that office attendance is a factor in annual performance reviews, according to the report.
The company’s employees spend at least three days a week in the office, as they have done for the past two years, and have occasional access to remote work. Any non-remote employees who are out of compliance get reminded about these policies.
Some companies have made changes to their work-from-home policies.
It was reported in May that Walmart was ending most remote work and asking staff at small offices in Dallas, Atlanta and Toronto to relocate to central hubs such as the retailer’s central headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, as well as Hoboken, New Jersey, or Northern California. Walmart will still permit staff to work from home some of the time.
In July 2023, Amazon ramped up its return-to-the-office mandate across the country by telling employees working remotely or located in smaller remote offices that they may have to return to what the company calls its “main hub” locations, including Seattle, New York and San Francisco.
“There’s more energy, collaboration and connections happening since we’ve been working together at least three days per week, and we’ve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices,” Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser told PYMNTS at the time in an emailed statement.