I've been thinking a lot about my recent conversation with Matthew Saxon, Zoom's chief people officer. Since last fall, Zoom employees who live within 50 miles of its U.S. offices (it has four) have been mandated to return to their desks two days per week, Saxon told me. A large part of that policy is underpinned by Zoom's desire to better understand the needs of its customers—many of whom are fully back in-person. Workers spend in-office time on meaningful collaborative work, like training, all-hands meetings, and team happy hours. “But I don’t think people need that all the time,” Saxon, who works fully remotely himself, noted. Though “a sprinkle of in-person work every so often can really help," if people simply come in because they're told to, and spend their day doing individual work, "there’s no real difference." Wading back into the office mandates discussion reminded me of my numerous interviews with Annie Dean, who heads up Team Anywhere at Atlassian and has spent her career advocating for flexible and distributed work. “The idea that if you bring everyone into this mandatory [office] environment, working shoulder to shoulder, magical outcomes will come—that’s a silly thing,” she said last year. “It feels like magical thinking.” She also thinks required in-office days, which are “the crux” of most hybrid plans, are the worst of all, doing nothing but saddling a company with “all the costs of the old model [and none of the] efficiencies of the new model.” (Atlassian employees can work from anywhere.) So the #returntooffice conversation continues. What do you think? Read the full story on Fortune: https://lnkd.in/eRKRVwPi
Nick Valluri
4mo
I do think there’s a middle ground that hasn’t been found yet - however I’m curious as to why Zoom’s CPO feels like he can do his job remotely while the rest of their employees cannot (not trying to be accusatory, I’m paraphrasing the quote from the article)? And also how the 50 mile radius thing was calculated given that people weren’t hired with this approach in mind. Seems like you’d end up with a very random sampling of employees in the office. Tamara Sanderson would be interested in your thoughts.
It's actually not utterly surprising. Contrary to common perception, Zoom is NOT a remote work company and has never been: Video conferencing is the 1:1 replication of co-located synchronous ways of working – quite the opposite of mature remote work, characterised by independence from both location and _time_. As a company Zoom has never worked like this. That Zoom became synonymous with remote work is a giant misunderstanding.
Danny Groner
4mo
I don’t believe it to be a contradiction that Zoom has in-office time, in fact it makes more sense, not less sense, that they do. Part of thinking critically as an adult is understanding when two things can be true at once, and it’s usually not either/or. Similarly, I also don’t agree fully with the casting in that story from the executive about why office time is essential. There are better cases to be made than what that one executive had to say on the subject matter.
Anil Saxena
4mo
This is interesting and I agree back to office mandates are not a panacea. Feels like we need to really think about how work should look to be the most effective.
Peter Moglia
4mo
I'm in the process of reading the Pittsburgh research on RTO as well as the study published by Nature about hybrid work - definitely want to use this story as a touch point too!
Omar Ramirez
4mo
Fascinating read.
CEO at Work Forward | advisor, speaker & bestselling author | startup CEO, Google, Slack | Forbes' Future of Work 50
4moI definitely get Zoom's desire, and agree with a lot of what Matthew Saxon is saying about the "why" behind purposeful time together, especially deeply collaborative work, and training. But those types of work also usually involve people who are distributed beyond the 50 mile radius. One of the challenges with a mandate like that is that sizable portions of teams live outside that circle (including apparently Matt...). The approach Zillow took makes more sense to me: people do come together regularly, (3-4 times a year for many, travel is funded), regional offices are now onsite centers, and a central team helps coordinate so that time together is high impact and teams overlap to build connection. "You chose to live close to HQ, therefore you have different rules" feels pretty capricious.