Zoom made headlines this week for announcing its own “return to office” policy, requiring all workers within a 50-miles radius of an office to commute at least 2 times a week. It’s certainly ironic for a company that massive expanded thanks to remote work. It’s also not the only one.
Across industry and geography, companies are grappling with preferred structures for work: fully remote on one side, fully in-person on the other, and “hybrid work” somewhere in between the binary. From my experience, the common arguments go like this:
- In-person: More bonding, more serendipity, and more productive employees from having teams present together at the same time. Working alone just isn’t the same, and we’re losing out to teams who are moving faster in person.
- Remote: Why go into the office and scramble for a conference room to call your teammates across the world? Why waste hours commuting back-and-forth when we can be just as productive (if not more) at home?
- Hybrid: Best of both worlds! We can have in-person camaraderie some of the week, but still give people the flexibility to juggle the rest of life by working from home.
The reality is that different companies have different needs. Small startups may lean towards in-person or hybrid work because it’s not just building a product, it’s building an entirely new company and culture. Highly decentralized companies may favor more remote work because of the realities of their workforce. You’d think that B2B SaaS companies like Zoom or the Big Tech conglomerates would favor remote work given how much they’ve benefitted from it, but the Sunk Cost Fallacy of large real estate holdings is likely playing a part in their insistence in return-to-office policies (“we can’t let all of these leases or buildings we outright own go to waste”). Micromanagement and other low-trust company environments also favor in-person work, even if it’s a net-negative to productivity and employee well-being.
I previously stated my opinions about the “false dichotomy” of hybrid work: in-person workers frequently take calls inside and outside of the office, while remote workers choose to attend big meetups or visit headquarters once in a while. I also think that the “you’re all adults, figure out what works best with your team” policy is a lot better than broad edicts. Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future, but for now, flexibility to do what works best for you — whether that’s going into a specific work environment every day, working virtually from a place you enjoy, or splitting your time across in-person and remote — is what I think a strong company should do.
Andrew Jabara 