Zoom, a pandemic darling, calls workers back to the office

Zoom recently sounded the death knell of remote work—at least according to a few dire headlines—when the company announced it would ask some employees to come back into the office two days a week.

The news was striking, given that Zoom is a pandemic darling that helped fuel the remote work revolution when many workers were forced to conduct business over video calls in 2020. But Zoom’s Covid-era profits didn’t stick (the firm announced in February it would lay off 1,300 employees), nor did its “forever” remote-work policy.

The decision comes as once-prominent remote work boosters are changing their messaging on flexibility. Though Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once declared office mandates were “never going to work,” employees in customer-facing roles are now required to be in an office four days a week. Benioff suggested in a March podcast interview that new employees perform better in an office. That same month, Salesforce shut down the remote-work research arm of Slack, the essential pandemic-era platform it acquired in 2021.

Other firms that cashed in on remote work have also tightened up their policies. Though DocuSign had several false starts bringing workers back to the office, about 70% of the company’s 6,500 employees returned to the office under a hybrid arrangement in June, according to the New York Times. Peloton, which saw sales rise by more than 170% in Q4 2020, started asking employees to come into an office three days a week last September.

Take Zoom’s RTO with a grain of salt. A closer look at Zoom’s return-to-office policy hardly suggests the company is abandoning remote work. Only workers who live within 50 miles of a Zoom office will be required to come in two days a week—and that quota is seen by some scholars as the “sweet spot” for keeping workers satisfied and productive, Sarah Green Carmichael wrote in a Bloomberg Opinion piece, citing Harvard Business School data.

“What Zoom’s decision really shows is that hybrid work—not fully remote work and not five-days-a-week in-person work—is the new normal,” Carmichael wrote.

Hybrid is now the dominant work model, according to HR tech firm Scoop Technologies, which found in its Q2 report that 51% of companies had adopted this arrangement. The share of companies in the firm’s Flex Index that were fully in-office dropped from 49% to 42% between Q1 and Q2 this year.

For Zoom workers who do return to the office, it will look different than it did pre-pandemic, thanks to an emphasis on collaboration, rather than productivity. Like many HR departments, Zoom has been rethinking the purpose of offices in a hybrid world, and dismantled the cubicles in its San Jose headquarters, the Wall Street Journal reported last year.