Corporations blame the remote for all their troubles

Does it really interfere with the success of companies or a matter of poor management?

Former CEO Google said that the company is losing a technological race due to the fact that it allows employees to work on a remote. He was immediately criticized on social networks. The Trade Union of Google employees in response stated that the case is in regular reductions and management of management. They often say about remote work that it reduces labor efficiency - the “cold” figured out whether this is true.

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Until 2020, the issue of mass remote work was discussed as an experimental practice, to which large corporations (and not always successfully ) resorted to occasionally - approximately as they say about a four -day working week. Everything was changed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which made the remote control with a non-alternative mode of operation due to the elbows. Many companies, such as Facebook , willingly offered their employees to stay at home for security purposes - and even paid them a thousand dollars to arrange a home office.

However, when two years later coronavirus restrictions were removed almost everywhere, employees did not want to return to the offices. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2019, only nine million Americans worked remotely-in 2021 this figure tripled (27.6 million people), and in 2025, according to the UPWORK forecast (the world's largest platform on which freelancers and companies can find each other), up to 36.2 million Americans will remotely work.

This trend annoys the leaders of Bigtech-Companies-the most fierce supporters of office work.

“Are you going to work from home, but force everyone else who, for example, made your car, work at the factory? <...> Is it ethical? " - said Ilon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner X (last Twitter).

Criticized the remote control of Openai Sam Altman : “Definitely one of the worst errors of the technological industry for a long time was that everyone could go to remote work forever ... Technologies are still not good enough to work forever, especially in startups.”

In August 2024, Eric Schmidt, a former executive director of Google, made a similar statement at a lecture in Stanford: “Google decided that the balance between work and personal life, early leaving home and work from the house is more important than victory. But the reason why startups take off is that people work as damned. ”

So Schmidt answered the question about the reasons for the Google backward in competition with Openai in the development of artificial intelligence technologies. Criticism with a billionaire of remote work caused such a resonance that he had to publicly abandon his words and ask Stanford to remove the lecture from the Utube channel.

In his speech, Schmidt immediately touched on three questions that are important for any discussion about the remote. Does it really harm the productivity of employees? Is the remote control and Work-Life Balance (balance between work and personal life) make the company not competitive? And why, in the end, almost every technological CEO strives to return the workers to the office?

Productivity

“Flexible conditions do not slow down our work,” they reacted to Schmidt’s words at the Alphabet Inc. Management, the control of Google. “Lack of staff, displacement of priorities, constant dismissal, lack of wage growth and the fact that management does not control the projects poorly - these factors slow down the work of Google employees every day.” According to the logic of representatives of the trade union, to blame for the fact that the company is losing a technological race, it is not necessary for ordinary employees, but negligent managers who cannot effectively organize the work of the company and blame the remotes (even partial) in all sins.

In June 2024, Stanford University, where Schmidt performed, released a study on the influence of a hybrid mode of operation on companies and their employees. The case was analyzed, an identical to the hybrid policy of Google: that is, two remote days, three - office. The conclusion is “hybrid” employees as productive as the office, and at the same time, 33% less tend to quit. Because one of the frequent reasons for dismissal is an uncomfortable location of the office and too long the road to the workplace - with hybrid mode, it becomes less important.

But what about the full remote - when a person does not appear in the office at all? It is more and more complicated, because with this regime, the management “by definition” does not have almost all the classic management and control levers (we will return to this). The same Stanford has a detailed report that states that completely remote employees in the United States are only 10% (two times less “hybrid”) and on average 10–20% are less productive than their “office” colleagues.

Among the reasons: difficulties in communication and coordination of work, less mentoring and feedback. According to the Upgraded Points survey, most “remoters” tend to spend working hours for not quite working activities: 75% of the respondents spend it on scrolling social networks, 72% try to combine work with household chores, and 22% can sleep in the middle of the working day.

However, a complete remote-even for the United States is still a rarity, and the same Schmidt criticized the hybrid regime, which uses both Google and Open AI , with which the billionaire compared his former company. This in itself refutes his argument about the incompatibility of work from the house and breakthroughs of startups. But there are other examples.

“Smell. I know one large technological company, which is more expensive than Google and continues to win, without sacrificing the balance between work and personal life, ”Schmidt Boyan Tunguz, a former NVIDIA software engineer, commented on Twitter.

NVIDIA in the context of Bigtech is really unique , because its executive director Jensen Juang, unlike its colleagues from Silicon Valley, does not mind the remote work of its employees. And almost complete - up to four days a week.

Such a policy that Facebook top management was fighting , for example, NVIDIA did not prevent a breakthrough in AI and in June 2024 to become the most expensive company in the world, overtaking Microsoft and Apple.

Then why does so many Bigtech-entrepreneurs, from mask to Zuckerberg and from Altman to Schmidt, the prospect of sending their employees to work from the house for at least two days a week causes such a skepticism? Here you can distinguish two main reasons.

Meeting at a coffee machine

Even those companies that recognize the preservation (and even an increase ) of the productivity of employees on the remotement note its critical disadvantage - it harms creativity.

One of the American companies that introduced the remote operation for its employees was the Yahoo corporation, which decided to take such a step back in the early 2010s. But in 2013, managers handed it back. The remote employees came a letter from the management about returning to the office regime: “To become the best place to work, communication and cooperation are very important, and we need to work side by side. That is why we all have to be present in the offices. Some of the best decisions and ideas come during discussions in corridors and cafes and dating with new people. ”

Salle Kravkek, founder of the Ellevest startup, an investment platform for women, repeated the same abstracts after 10 years (in which, by the way, Schmidt invested ). Working from the house, its employees began to fit better into deadlines and, in general, became more productive, but this happened to the detriment of their creativity. “You cannot encounter each other at the coffee machine when you are in Zoom ... we are more productive, but less creative,” said Kravkek.

The importance of “meeting with a coffee machine” for the development of the company is confirmed by a joint study of Oxford and Pittsburgh universities. Having analyzed 20 million scientific works and four million patent applications published and submitted from 1960 and 1976, respectively, the researchers came to the conclusion that innovative work and patents were much more common (22% and 27%) created commands located in the same city, and not scattered around the world.

“For example, a graduate student is easier to informally discuss ideas with a professor in the corridor than by e -mail. Even taking into account the digital achievements of online meetings, they cannot completely replace the unique value of personal interaction in the feeding of innovation, ”one of the co-authors of the study said .

Conservatism

The second reason lies in the fact that almost all modern CEO built their companies at a time when the concepts of “office” and “corporate culture” were inseparable. And the experiment with the remote, which began in 2020, turns over ideas about the management of the company on which they have been based for decades.

If we analyze the “proofis” arguments of Ilon Mask, you can see that they come from his personal experience of the workaholic: “After all, why did I sleep so many times in the factory? Because it mattered. "

The same references to personal experience are traced in the argument of the former CEO of IBM Corporation Luis Gertner: “When I was a young employee in a consulting company, I had a mentor with whom I worked closely. I often visited his office ... Those who seek to cope with the most difficult tasks should go to the office and learn how to manage and lead others ”(Gertner was a young employee of the consulting company in the 1960s).

According to the founder of the EZPR startup and the author of The Atlantic, Ed Zitron, for the current generation of managers, the corporate culture still implies that the employee is obliged not only to fulfill his main working tasks, but also to obey a number of requirements for behavior and appearance. The point at which this submission occurs is an office.

“It is much more difficult to force people to work late when you cannot lock them in one place with free food, a ping-pong table, a refrigerator with beer or laundry services-the advantages that you offer instead of monetary compensation,” Zitron writes. “When you work full -time, you can assume that you belong to the company and should be grateful to its leaders for making you generously appear in their office every day.”

Forbes Columnist Jack Kelly believes that the remotes also opened the weakness of the middle -level management - without which, as it turned out, workers may well do. “People were incredibly productive, being at home - without overseers who breathe in the back of the head. Very soon, superior leaders will begin to wonder what the middle -level managers actually do, and will think about whether this is an empty waste of money. ” According to Kelly, it is this layer that is most interested in the lobbying of office work.

As we saw in the discussion after Schmidt’s speech, the trade union can take a solid “instilled” position, and companies like NVIDIA, Adobe , Airbnb or Intel confirm that with competent management, success is possible even if there are no employees in the office four days a week.

In addition, after 2020, workers around the world were used not to waste their time on the road. According to the American Institute of Public Opinion Gallup , 90% of office employees do not want to return to the old operating mode. And one way or another they will have to reckon and negotiate.