End of an era: Zoom tells employees to return to office for work::Zoom is asking all of its employees to return to the office for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, when the tech company blew up as one of the main means of communication when people were forced to work from home.
Pretty bad optics when your company depends on enabling collaboration in virtual settings.
This is what is referred to as a “backdoor” or “quite” layoff.
They know there are people who either can’t come in or who will refuse to come in. By getting people to trim themselves from their books, they get to cut costs without actually having to do layoffs.
This is the first step of modern cost cutting. Next we will hear about other cost cutting measures, and then eventually layoffs.
Exactly this. My previous employer announced an end to wfm followed shortly by some people I knew getting warned that they may be laid off. But enough people quit that nobody got laid off.
did the people who quit get reasonable severance packages? If so, were they reasonable compared to if they had been laid off?
I never understood this tactic. Why demoralize your whole workforce for months until enough motivated and talented people leave that you don’t have to fire anyone. The useless ones are never the first ones to leave, especially if they don’t have any talents to sell to other companies. Also people don’t leave immediately after it turns bad, it usually takes months for them to be demoralized enough and find new arrangements.
By that time wouldn’t it be smarter to eat the cost of firing people from the start, get rid of the fat, pay the severance and move on with those that can still lead you to success? I’m convinced the moral hit would be a lot less this way and the bounce back would be faster.
It makes the short term numbers look good. They just want to produce a spreadsheet that tells Wall Street that they cut $x million in labour costs, and don’t really care how that affects the long term health of the company.
Besides, when a corporation becomes a certain size, they don’t invest in innovation any more, they just buy a start-up that did something innovative, integrate it into their existing product and then repeat the cycle.
Capitalism is trending more and more into short term thinking, because Wall Street realised that capital can be moved at the press of a button. When a corporation is sucked dry, you load it with debt, sell your stock to retail investors, pension funds and/or the government and move on to the next opportunity.
I worked for a guy who referred to it as “layoff by attrition” who essentially explained that they only have a couple heads over what they predicted based on production volume, and they know the conditions at the plant aren’t nice to be in, 95° F and 50% through most of the summer in a stamping and welding shop. So instead of a tiny layoff or firing people they just wait until the people who won’t put up with the conditions on the floor take care of it themselves.
I’m a simple man… I see “NY Post,” I click the downvote button.
Simple mind indeed, dont bother reading and analyzing the contents, just give up
If it’s actually newsworthy, the same content is available elsewhere.
The NY Post is garbage.
No-one’s obligated to read trash. I don’t read other tabloids in case they might have a point.
What’s the point of Zoom as a product then?
Clickbaity article
Zoom […] is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
So it’s not “all of it’s employees”. Plus, it’s a hybrid schedule, which, for better or worse, has now become a standard across most organisations around the world.
I honestly think it’s good to get into the office space just for a change of mentality and scenery and a little socialization. Helps you get out of being at home all the time kind of funk.
I agree, being able to go into the office has been a nice change of scene and variety in the day (not to mention addressing the social atrophy I’ve experienced over the last few years!)
It’s the ability to make that a choice is what’s important. Corporate lifestyle is so dammed dehumanizing, with my bi-annual 5 star rating, the threat of at-will employment, lackluster vacation and total dependency on employer provided healthcare… It’s no surprise that the ability to have any autonomy over working hours and location has become such a divisive topic. :(
I’m not sure why so many companies are obsessed with getting their employees back to the office, not needing to have everyone within a 1 hour radius of your offices opens a lot of doors when it comes to recruitment while not affecting performance.
I’d speculate some combination of control over employees (poor management practices, etc) and making use of owned land/offices that are difficult to sell otherwise. Not much else makes sense to me, especially for tech companies where nearly the entire job exists in virtual space of some kind - no wrenches to turn.
Edit: Someone else suggested a way to “lay off” folks by having them voluntarily leave the job to avoid the return to office. That also sounds pretty plausible to me with the extent to which companies are starting to squeeze with what feels like an incoming recession period.
Using it as a way to reduce your workforce is so short sighted. The top performers are the ones most capable of getting a new job and most willing to leave over the issue. Instead of it being a calculated set of layoffs in specific areas of the company it’ll just be all the good employees leaving.
When my former employer went remote for covid, Meeting culture got worse, comms became less efficient and arguably collaboration did suffer. Defect rate in code also increased amongst the junior cohort and we determined (staff survey) it was due to senior and junior developers having fewer opportunities to connect and engage with high quality pair programming and mentoring sessions.
Half the table decided this was because remote work doesn’t work. The other half speculated that it’s because we tried to recreate the “in office” experience remotely, and that doesn’t work well. Sadly the company refused to adapt, and many were laid off. There was also a sizable tax break we got by being a large office that bought people into the city and support the local economy which likely had a material influence in their decision to layoff most remote/hybrid people.
My point with the anecdote is that I truly believe it’s rooted in a failure to adapt office culture. Willfully or unable too, it’s too nuanced to assert generally, and there’s also an entire segment of the workforce where on-site is essential and I’m not qualified to comment on.
Recent analysis of data suggests that productivity suffers when employees work remotely, and the effect is more dramatic the longer people remain away. This contradicts earlier studies conducted during the pandemic.
I’m not saying I agree… just that this is the reason.
Here is a recent paper that showed an 18% decline in productivity when workers moved remotely.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515.
Another study, originally published during the pandemic, initially found an 8% increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer when they began working from home. The original study is here.
Apparently new analysis of the data has shown a 4% decline instead of an 8% improvement. I can’t find the revised analysis but this was quoted in Bloomberg and the Economist … both behind pay walls unfortunately.
Because most people can’t wfh. I work with many that maybe do 1 or 2 hours of actual work every day. When they’re in the office, their productivity doubles. Management won’t fire them because it takes over a year to fill most positions. And the pay is very high so it’s not that.
