Google is reportedly pushing its employees to return to the office and to ensure that the company has made office attendance a part of employees’ performance reviews. In basically, this indicates that work done at home will not be considered favorably in comparison to work done at an office.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the corporation threatened to include office attendance in an employee’s performance review if they didn’t comply with the three-day minimum for in-office work in an internal email.
Google updated its hybrid work policy, which required employees to be physically present in the office at least three days a week, back in March. Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told the company as a whole in an email that only a select few employees will have access to the full work-from-home option. There’s just no substitute for coming together in person, she said, explaining the rationale for the push for work-from-home policies.
In the email, Cicconi wrote, “We’ve heard from Googlers that those who spend at least three days a week in the office feel more connected to other Googlers, and that this effect is magnified when teammates work from the same location. Of course, not everyone believes in ‘magical hallway conversations,’ but there’s no question that working together in the same room makes a positive difference.”
She further revealed that many of the products announced at the recent Google I/O 2023 were a result of in-person work. In some cases, she added, employees are not permitted to work from home. For instance, the poor air quality in Canada is due to hundreds of wildfires.
When asked for comment on the policy changes, a Google spokesperson sent an email statement: “Our hybrid approach is designed to incorporate the best of being together in person with the benefits of working from home for part of the week. Now that we’re more than a year into this way of working, we’re formally integrating this approach into all of our workplace policies.”
Remote Work’s Impact on Productivity
Google argues that it needs in-person work to encourage collaboration. “Not everyone believes in ‘magical hallway conversations,’ but there’s no question that working together in the same room makes a positive difference,” wrote Google chief people officer Fiona Cicconi in the email announcing the change, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Both Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claim that fully remote workers are less productive than those who had at least some in-person office time before the pandemic. According to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, workers who work entirely online are less productive than those who had at least some time in an office setting before the pandemic.
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a statement in March.
It is still unclear how remote work changes employee productivity. Managers believe that staying at home hurts performance, while employees argue the opposite. By not commuting, workers also save time, which is often utilized to do more work. As much as companies want to have workers back, experts argue that remote work will be part of the new normal.
