My company is an international tech company (still a start up) with employees in different locations throughout the US and a few other countries. So 80% or more of the employees of this company work solely from home and always have. There is an office in the US and a few of us go into the office and have the option of working from home on Wednesdays only.
CEO decided recently to get more strict about not working from home. He sent us all this email. For a company that seemed pretty hip and informed, the email contained some surprising views.
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The company rule is that employees should be in the office Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. With the option of working from home on Wednesdays if you prefer that.
Here are some of the factors that management considered to support the decision:
- Sharing and receiving knowledge and growth with team members – this is super important as the company grows a ton over the next 5 years.
- Teaching people early in their careers or early with the company and giving them the same opportunity to learn that we had.
- Ability to work across teams and understand what’s going on with different teams. For example Sales / Marketing and CSAs / Product or anyone and the visiting engineer being in close contact has a ton of value for the different groups and departments.
- Professional growth, both our growth and the growth of others. And being challenged by being next to other people and exposed to other’s learning experiences
- Fostering team culture, especially as we grow our teams.
Now of course AirBnB will have a different policy because they want to sell more AirBnBs (same with other companies that benefit from people working from home like FB and Twitter – people use a lot more instagram working from home). I’m guessing that in general a lot of dead end / glass ceiling jobs will dangle WFH as a perk – because they need the carrot. And of course Apple employees will keep freaking about having to go to the office because they live in San Francisco and Apple just built a $5 billion complex 2 hours away from San Francisco (but conveniently located near where the apple execs live in the hills of suburban San Jose). These exceptions aside, I don’t see WFH as having legs – because ultimately in my opinion it's not how we become the best version of ourselves and in an increasingly globalizing and competitive world, that’s what we need to do to succeed.
That being said, there are certain circumstances and certain roles where employees can be authorized by their manager and HR to work from home more often than the general rule for specific reasons. Feel free to reach out to me or HR or your manager if you have any questions. But in general, with this new round of updates from the CDC, our pandemic policy on this has concluded and we are back to business as usual in the office.