For many industry leaders, accessing a wider talent pool outside of traditional tech hubs isn’t enough to make up for those drawbacks. That’s a problem for tech companies needing to out-innovate the competition.
More recent research showed that interacting through a screen can make workers less likely to generate ideas. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour found that working remotely made Microsoft’s remote workers miss important learning opportunities by not rubbing elbows with coworkers who aren’t part of their immediate team. What changed? The US is experiencing the biggest decline in worker productivity since 1948, according to research from EY-Parthenon, and many executives have been quick to single out remote work as the main culprit. Now, it might not be fine after all: Late last year, he wondered in an internal Slack if the “much lower productivity” of employees hired during the pandemic is “a reflection of our office policy,” according to CNBC. “They’re mostly at home, and that’s fine,” he said then. In 2021, Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff was seemingly at peace with the idea of never again seeing his company’s glitzy San Francisco skyscraper bustling with workers. Fast forward to 2023, Zuck is saying that in-person engineers “get more done” and that Meta is reevaluating its distributed team approach. In May 2020, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to mold Facebook into “the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale.” In the first months of the pandemic, he said employees could apply to make their job permanently remote and predicted that half of the company could work off-site in 5–10 years.
But now, one after another, Silicon Valley bosses are trading remote work evangelism for remote work frustration, citing productivity concerns. When the pandemic shut down the world, many tech leaders were quick to proclaim a permanent WFH revolution.
Can you guess what “one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes” is, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman? It’s buying into the idea that 100% remote work wouldn’t cost startups creativity, as he recently said at an event organized by payment company Stripe.
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