Billionaire CEOs said working from home made them happier. Some now want to fire workers who don't show up to the office.
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- Many CEOs have changed their tune on working from home.
- At the height of the pandemic, bosses such as Mark Zuckerberg declared remote work was the future.
- Some firms are threatening to fire or discipline staff who don't show up at the office.
After more than three years of flexible working, many white-collar workers see working from home as the status quo.
Bosses, it turns out, no longer agree.
Many of the CEOs who vocally praised and encouraged remote work as a way to avoid total cessation of business during the pandemic have changed their tune.
Through August, firms such as Meta and Goldman Sachs have issued strict return-to-office mandates with threats to track performance or even terminate employees who don't turn up in the office often enough.
That change threatens to reverse progress in terms of flexible working. Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School and remote work expert, previously told Insider that "when you allow flexibility, it expands your talent pool".
And those employees themselves increasingly value the opportunity for remote work, with some describing flexible workplaces as an equivalent benefit to an 8% raise, according to The Wall Street Journal. In some cases, pressure to return to the office has prompted workers to unionize – or even quit.
Here are some of the CEOs who have most drastically changed their tune:
Mark Zuckerberg said in 2020 remote work would boost prosperity across the US
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At the start of the pandemic, Zuckerberg was all for working from home.
In his internal weekly townhall in May 2020, two months into the first US lockdowns, he effused about the larger recruitment pool that flexible working created, saying it would "open up a lot of new talent that previously wouldn't have considered moving to a big city." Like other major tech firms, Meta hired heavily in the run-up to and during the pandemic.
He anticipated half of Facebook's staff would be working remotely within the next five to 10 years.
His praise for working from home continued into 2021.
"I've found that working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work," he told employees in June that year, per the Journal.
The Meta CEO told staff they could expect him to spend half of the next year working remotely. His confidence in the future of remote living and remote work underpinned the firm's huge product, branding, and spending drive to develop the metaverse — Meta's expensive, virtual-reality world.
At this point, Meta staff could get permission to stay working from home, otherwise they would need to come to the office at least half the time.
Now Meta's office workers face the axe if they don't come in
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Skip to 2023 and Meta has laid off swathes of staff, while funding for its metaverse division has been diverted to AI. The firm has cut about 25% of staff since November 2022 in a drive towards efficiency and profitability.
And accordingly, Zuckerberg made a U-turn on remote working.
As reported by Insider's Kali Hays and Hugh Langley, the company laid out an updated and much more stringent return-to-office policy due to start September. Some employees will be approved for remote work, but coming into work is strictly mandatory for everyone else most of the week. Staff will now be monitored by management to ensure they turn up, and could be disciplined or even sacked if they repeatedly fail to comply.
In contrast to Zuckerberg's pandemic-era support of home-working as a productivity driver, he now highlights that performance data from the company shows that "people who work from home are not efficient and engineers who come to the office get more work done."
Evan Spiegel loved the chance to spend time with his family in 2020
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Evan Spiegel was early to implement a remote-working policy at Snap in March 2020 as Covid-19 started to spread in the US.
Six weeks into the pandemic, Spiegel announced that he did not want to return to the office.
"I told our team I'm not coming back," he told the Journal.
Professing to finding joy in sharing a breakfast and dinner table with his family, he said that "the thing that's been so profound for me, I'm actually a part of our family now."
"This is going to take time and we don't want to force it", he said of returning to the office on CNBC in April 2020.
But two years on, it's employees he wanted to spend time with
ERIC PIERMONT
It seems Spiegel had had enough family time by November 2022.
An internal memo revealed that Snap had ordered all employees to return to the office four days a week by February 2023.
"I believe that spending more time together in person will help us to achieve our full potential," Spiegel wrote. "What each of us may sacrifice in terms of our individual convenience, I believe we will reap in terms of our collective success."
The "default together" policy, as Speigel described it, applies to employees in the company's 30 global offices, but Snap has an exceptions process for staff to request remote work.
Earlier in 2022, Snap fired 20% of its workforce and cut projects that weren't profitable. Spiegel added in the November memo that a present office "will help us to accelerate our growth and deliver on our strategic priorities of growing our community, reaccelerating our revenue growth, and leading in AR."
His workers didn't necessarily agree, with one messaging Insider's Kali Hays the word "no" 17 times in a message.
Twitter employees were told they could work from home forever
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Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, Twitter's employees were offered a utopia where they could work from home permanently, even after pandemic lockdowns ended.
In May 2020, Dorsey replied to a tweet asking if Twitter would allow employees to work at home forever. "There are a small number of roles, like our data center folks, that require on site, but otherwise yes!" he responded.
This was backed up by an official Twitter statement promising, "if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen."
Even before the pandemic, Dorsey had experimented with flexible working, suggested a "distributed workforce'" with remote employees living far from the San Francisco headquarters.
New CEO, new rules — and no more working from home
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That vision of flexible working was all to change when Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022. Musk is known to prefer in-person work, and his brash reversal of Twitter's policies would put employees on a rollercoaster.
During a Twitter town hall held in June 2022, before he took over, Musk told workers that he preferred in-person work, unless someone is "exceptional."
True to his word, in his first week Musk banned remote work in a 2:30 a.m email to Twitter staff.
"The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed. We are also changing Twitter policy such that remote work is no longer allowed, unless you have a specific exception," he wrote, saying that he would be the one to personally assess requests for exception.
This was revised a few days later to allow employees' actual managers to take responsibility for assessing if they were "making an excellent contribution."
Musk went on to lay off nearly 6,500 employees.
He has kept up his hardline stance. In March 2023, journalist Zoe Schiffer tweeted that Musk had once again been up at 2:30 a.m to email staff after noting how empty the San Francisco office had been. The "office is not optional," he reiterated.
In practice, Musk hasn't been able to force employees back across the board, partly because Twitter itself can't afford to keep its offices open. In January, Twitter shuttered its Asian headquarters in Singapore and told staffers to work remotely, Bloomberg reported.
Zoom was the poster child for remote work
Kena Betancur
Other than vaccine developers, Zoom was arguably the company that became most synonymous with the COVID-19 era, cementing itself as a verb in the English lexicon within weeks of lockdown announcements.
So it would have been hard for its chief executive Eric Yuan, whose net worth reportedly peaked at $29 billion during the pandemic, to deny Zoom employees flexibility.
For a while it seemed that the company would maintain remote working. Even when offices were beginning to reopen, Zoom announced in January 2022 that less than 2% of its workforce would return to work in the office.
"Workers genuinely want choice, and they are choosing to continue to work at home," Zoom chief financial officer Kelly Steckelberg told MarketWatch.
Still: Unlike some of the other wealthy CEOs on this list, Eric Yuan has always been a little skeptical of permanent remote work.
He told Insider in 2020: "After the pandemic crisis is over, after we all go back to the office, I do not think we always need to go back to the office for every employee. Very likely we will become hybrid: meaning, maybe today and tomorrow we can all work in the office, and then, starting the next week, we can all work from home."
Zoom wants workers back in 2023, symbolizing the death of remote work
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In August 2023, the company told its employees to return to the office, saying that anyone living with 50 miles of a Zoom office must work there for at least two days a week.
CEO Yuan said the reason for this mandate was that remote working made it difficult for employees to get to know each other and build trust. "Trust is a foundation for everything. Without trust, we will be slow," he said at a company meeting.
In a potentially brand-damaging comment, Yuan also said that Zoom doesn't enable truly honest conversations and exchanges of ideas. "We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call," he said. "As a company, we are in a better position to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers."
Marc Benioff criticized return-to-office mandates
Roy Rochlin
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was initially outspoken in his support for remote working. In February 2021 Salesforce revealed new guidelines which gave employees the option to work remotely full time.
Salesforce said the decision to offer new ways of working was based on employee wellness surveys the company had been sending around since the onset of the pandemic. There was no room for doubt in the guidelines: "The 9-to-5 workday is dead."
In June 2022 as offices started to re-open more widely, Benioff doubled down on the strategy, telling staff at a company event that "office mandates are never going to work", per Yahoo Finance.
Now Salesforce says remote work isn't as productive
Justin Sullivan
But this year it seems Marc Benioff is not so sure. Joining the growing list of CEOs that say remote work is not conducive to productivity, Salesforce revised its work-from-anywhere strategy.
In February 2023, internal Slack messages at Salesforce viewed by Insider announced that employees were required to come back to the office.
In March 2023, Benioff explained his reasoning. "For our new employees who are coming in, we know empirically that they do better if they're in the office, meeting people, being onboarded, being trained," he said in an interview with the podcast On With Kara Swisher. "If they are at home and not going through that process, we don't think they're as successful."
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