Zoom CEO Eric Yuan wants all staff back in the office at least two days a week, saying during a companywide meeting they “cannot have a great conversation” through only remote meetings.
Zoom transformed office work during COVID, and now the company is mandating any employee living within 50 miles (80km) must come into the office at least 40% of the time.
“Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it’s really hard. We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”
Zoom has recently received backlash following changes made to their terms and conditions, which quietly announced it plans on scrapping users’ private video, audio and messaging sessions for the “training and tuning” of future AI projects.
“In our early days, we all knew each other.”
Yuan claimed the camaraderie between staff eroded due to isolation of remote work, and the expansion of the workforce.
“Over the past several years, we’ve hired so many new ‘Zoomies’ that it’s really hard to build trust. Trust is a foundation for everything. Without trust, we will be slow.”
Sparking outrage online was the new T+C of Zoom, to which users began threatening the cancellation of accounts due to possibly invasive changes.
Elliot Higgins from Bellingcat (News ORG) said “We run our training workshops on Zoom, so Zoom is effectively planning to train its AI on our entire workshop content with no compensation, so bye-bye Zoom.”
AI models are trained through large amounts of publicly available data, likely taken from open internet. Zoom’s move will be applying these techniques to private customer data, likely including things such as intimate family calls, and sensitive corporate meetings.
Yuan’s recent comments are not the first indication Zoom will be moving away from remote work and video conferencing.
At one stage, the company claimed staff would be permitted to work from home “indefinitely,” however, the revised plan, becoming public this month, stated the company were intending to mandate “a structured hybrid approach.”
This new policy is expected to rollout country by country over the next two months and has been stated as what’s “most effective for Zoom.”
However, despite this, the company claim it will continue to “hire the best talent, regardless of location.”
As of reports from January, the company currently employees 8,400 people, with over half based in the US.
“As a company, we are in a better position to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers,” said the company.
