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
