Zoom, WFH Tool, Commands Employees Back To The Office
Despite acting as a facilitator of employees working remotely, Zoom has followed the lead of Amazon and Disney, and many Silicon Valley tech companies by ordering their workers back in the office beginning in August.
A shift from their previous work-from-home stance, the communications tech business said that they are moving in the direction of a “structured hybrid approach” and that workers living within 50 miles (80km) will be required to come into the office twice a week.
According to a survey by Stanford University researchers, around 12% of workers in the U.S., where Zoom is headquartered, were fully remote in July, while 29% had hybrid policies.
The U.S. working remotely patterns recorded in the surveys are similar to UK’s Office for National Statistics earlier this year. Whereas in Australia, 29% of Australians worked fully remote in 2022.
Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute, a think tank, said: “The overall weight of opinion among workers is strongly they’d like to keep doing it and I think an emerging majority of employers are thinking, no, they want people back to work.”
Leaders for JPMorgan Chase CEO, Tesla, Twitter, and beyond have mandated an end to remote work, but now unions in Australia are hitting back by taking to court the Australia’s biggest bank and the federal government to demand work flexibility.
As reported by Business Insider, Zoom said that the new policy would put the company in a “better position to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers”.
The new policy will upset the lives of many workers now forced to commute because only about 1% of the Zoom employees had “regular office presences” in September 2022, while 75% lived remotely or had hybrid arrangements, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The new policy also is being introduced at a time when Zoom has to meet the performance of competitors of rivals like Microsoft especially since growth has slowed sharply since the pandemic and staff had already been cut by 15%.
Working remotely is a sought-after aspect of a job for many because of the commute time, which can be dedicated to other things like family time or workouts, and there also is the cost savings aspect of working remotely for the commute and work clothes.
A Melbourne property surveyor that employs drone operator Nicholas Coomber appreciates the flexible schedule that allows him to pick up his children from daycare.
“If they were to say, ‘everyone back in the office’, I would probably be asking for a raise,” said Coomber, who goes into the office once or twice a week.
“You get more family time. You can actually finish work at five, rather than finishing at five spending 45 minutes trying to get home.”