Google and Microsoft have both affirmed their long-term commitment to hybrid working policies as long as workers maintain their productivity levels.
Amidst the fallout from Amazon’s—and, recently, Dell’s—decision to introduce a full-time Return to Office (RTO) mandate, rival tech giants have assuaged employees’ concerns that they might soon follow suit and return to work in the office five days a week.
During Google’s recent “TGIF” all-hands meeting, workers voiced concerns about a potential increase in in-office requirements. Business Insider reported that John Casey, Vice President of Global Compensation and Benefits, reassured the staff that the current three-day in-office policy is effective and will remain unchanged while underscoring the necessity of being in the office for at least three days a week.
Meanwhile, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stressed the importance of maintaining productivity on work-from-home days to support the company’s flexible policy. Despite Pichai’s comments, reportedly, some Google employees remain cautious about a viable future shift to a full-time office return.
Inside one of tech’s other behemoths, Business Insider also reported that Microsoft’s EVP of Cloud & AI Group, Scott Guthrie, promised staff in an internal meeting that Microsoft has no intention to call staff back into the office full time, responding to worker worries that it also might follow in Amazon’s footsteps.
Business Insider added that its two Microsoft sources who attended the meeting informed the publication that Guthrie’s guarantee only holds water if high productivity levels are sustained.
Wait, What Exactly Has Happened With Amazon?
Last month, Amazon mandated that employees must work in the office five days a week, starting at the beginning of next year.
In a letter to employees posted on the company’s website, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy suggested the experience of a three-day in-office mandate had “strengthened our conviction about the benefits” of working in the office.
“To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” Jassy wrote. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”
In the wake of the announcement, an anonymous survey was distributed across an Amazon Slack channel featuring over 30,000 employees. Within a few days, respondents recorded an average satisfaction rating of 1.4 for the RTO mandate. On a scale from one to five, this rating indicates a significant backlash, with one representing “strongly dissatisfied” and five representing “strongly satisfied”.
Meanwhile, Blind, a forum of verified tech workers, polled 2,500 Amazon workers. Not only were 91 percent of respondents unhappy with the new RTO mandate, but almost three-fourths (73 percent) said they were considering moving jobs elsewhere.
While a Devil’s Advocate position could be argued this strength of feeling is at least partly down to the reactive unhappiness in the days following the announcement rather than any substantive intention to begin looking for work elsewhere, the importance of flexible working for the modern workforce is supported by Owl Labs’ recent State of Hybrid Work Report 2024 which found almost half of workers would quit their roles if their company ended hybrid working and instituted a full-time in-office policy.
The Productivity Debate
As with any healthy topic for debate, there are compelling downsides and upsides to working from home and working in the office. In the office, many people find it easier to collaborate in person and engage in a work-social life, and many people feel more productive in a work-oriented environment. Meanwhile, people can lead a more fulfilling work/life balance while working from home, and inversely, many people also feel more productive without the distractions of a busy office.
Herein lies the productivity rub. People are fundamentally different, and trying to assert that returning to the office improves productivity across the board is disingenuous, especially with how opaque much of the data the companies justifying such a decision is.
As Barbara Matthews, CPO at Remote, commented to the publication HR Grapevine after the news about Google and Microsoft persisting with hybrid policies as long as productivity levels are high: “An increasing number of large corporations are making the mistake of rowing back on flexible work policies, signalling a belief that employees need to be physically present and monitored by managers in order to be productive.”
The poor morale and resentment that can be fostered by generally unpopular management decisions like full-time RTO mandates could, ironically, undermine the productivity levels they are supposed to bolster.