Most Companies Want Workers Back in Office or Want Them To Quit

Tech giants are revising their remote-working policies

After several failed attempts to bring workers back to the office, corporations are making a stronger push for a return to in-person work.

Many company leaders believe this month will be the last month for work-from-home employees. So they are mandating staff to return to their offices. Employees don't like this change of heart and are going crazy, hoping their bosses change their minds.

Offering generous perks didn't work.

Employers tried to persuade white-collar workers to return to work by enticing them with free pizza, dry cleaning services, catered lunch, and ice creams, but these measures didn't work. So now employers find themselves in a position where they have to take a harsher stand.

Corporate executives insist their employees return to the office or find another job. Companies like Apple started by saying employees can work from home as long as they need to, but Tim Cook recently changed his mind. Instead, Cook asked his employees to be in the office at least three days a week and possibly five days per week.

Cook sent a memo to his team saying that he needed them back in the office, "We are setting consistent days in the office to help us optimize our time for in-person collaboration." Of course, some of you are disappointed because you don't like to hear that face-to-face collaboration is beneficial, but numbers and data don't lie.

There is no such as a lone genius, and creativity is a team sport.

Apple knows that employees must come together and innovate as a group to stay competitive and innovative.

Despite what most employees think, innovation can't happen in isolation, and real conversations happen better face to face. As Janet Rae-Dupree's research proved, "Truly productive invention requires the meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators themselves don't always realize it."

Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar and one of the most creative people in the world, agrees with the above statement. However, he also believes that most employees don't understand how creativity and innovation work.

Catmull says, "People think of creativity as a mysterious solo act. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves many people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve many problems."

These interactions are more effective face-to-face with no time zone or legal challenges.

Tim Cook doesn't want Apple to become an average company.

If companies want to become mediocre, they are free to stay at home.

However, Tim Cook doesn't want to become an average company, "As the world's most innovative company, I believe we have a special obligation to get this right. So I am excited about the opportunity to come together in new ways and chart a new path in the era ahead."

Tim Cook's message is clear. Come back to the office, or find another job.

Keith Sawyer, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, confirms that "Innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it's built into the culture of successful companies." But unfortunately, this culture can't be built over Zoom.

Creativity needs healthy cultures, and you can't do that from home.

Executives must get talented people to work together to build that creative culture.

Working together effectively takes trust and respect, and neither of these qualities can be mandated. They must be created through repetitive, accidental experiences. These experiences can't be created through a virtual meeting.

If leaders get that right, the result is an energetic community where talented people are dedicated to one another, and the sum of their collective work exceeds anything any of them can create alone.

Most employees want to feel part of a great team and a big mission, and great leaders can foster this kind of environment where people can feel respected, valued, and appreciated. If you don't think your organization values you, your issue is not going to the office. Your problem is that you work in a horrible organization.

I know what I'm describing is the antithesis of what most people like to read, but that's the point: I believe that community matters. This point is emphasized through 10000s of great organizations that became great not because of great ideas but because of great teamwork.

Ed Catmull boils down his success at Pixar with one statement, "If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works." This kind of transformation can't happen from home. Connecting people to people and people to ideas and ideas and ideas work better when people meet in person.

Steve Jobs understood the power of design and accidental encounters.

Steve Jobs designed the Pixar building to force social interactions.

Most buildings are designed for functional purposes, but Pixar's headquarters is structured to maximize accidental encounters. However, if you design accidental encounters, they become intentional interactions between team members.

For example, When Steve Jobs built Pixar's main headquarter, he designed a large atrium with a cafeteria, meeting rooms, bathrooms, and mailboxes at its center. As a result, every employee has strong reasons to go there frequently during the workday. It's hard to convey just how helpful the resulting chance encounters are.

The success of Pixar and Apple was intentional.

Other companies are becoming as intentional, and step one in their intentionality is asking people to come back to work.

Unfortunately for employees who like to work from home, fears of a recession give employers an upper hand in this issue. For example, last year, a mortgage company decided all workers needed to return to their desks five days a week. A year later, the company is doing better than ever.

Other companies like Snap Inc, Ford Motor Co., Netflix Inc., Carvana Co., and more are laying people off, and people who desire to work from home are the first to be let go.

Most great companies in the United States have already asked employees to come back to the office or find another job.

Other companies who want their employees in the office:

• Elon Musk changed his company's remote-working policies and informed his staff that they must come to the office at least 40 hours per week or it would be assumed that they have quit.
• Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings asked his staff to return to the office and said, "Not being able to meet in person, particularly globally, is a clear negative, enticing staff to come back to work. He argues that the streaming service should keep its corporate culture intact."
• Meta's Facebook asked most of their team to return to the office. "Those who handle hardware or the infrastructure of the company's data centers must be in the office."
• Google is adopting a new policy, "three days in, two days at home."

As you can see, most dominant companies worldwide know the value of working from the office and understand that they can't dominate their sector by working from home.

However, many people will feel the need to attack this article before reading this statement, "I love a hybrid approach where people balance working from home and working from the office. I also believe that more than 70% of people are more productive working in an office setting."

Some people who don't like their companies or don't want to be held accountable will attack this article, and I'm okay with that. My advice to them is if you hate going to work, that's a different story, and it has nothing to do with locations.

For these readers, I ask them to do some reflection and see how they can find a job they enjoy and an employer who values their contributions.

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