That transition has been complicated by the rapid spread of the Delta variant, which has thrown off many technology companies’ plans to bring back most of their employees just before or after Labor Day weekend. Microsoft has pushed those dates back to October, while Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and a growing list of other companies have already decided to wait until next year.
“I thought this period of telecommuting would be the most difficult year and a half of my career, but that’s not the case,” says Brent Hyder, chief people officer at enterprise software maker Salesforce and its roughly 65,000 employees worldwide. “Getting everything back on track the way it’s supposed to be is proving even more difficult.
Given that they’ve set the tone for telecommuting, tech companies’ back-to-work moves are likely to have an impact on other industries as well. Employers’ next moves could redefine how and where people work, predicts Laura Boudreau, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University who studies workplace issues.
“We’ve moved past remote work as a temporary thing,” Boudreau says. The longer the pandemic drags on, the harder it becomes to tell employees to return to the office, especially full-time ones.
Because they tend to revolve around digital and online products, most tech jobs are made for remote work. Yet most large tech companies insist that their employees should be prepared to work two or three days a week in the office once the pandemic is over.
The main reason: technology companies have long believed that employees working together in a physical space can share ideas and innovate in ways that probably wouldn’t have happened in isolation. That’s one of the reasons tech titans have invested billions of dollars in corporate campuses outfitted with enticing common areas to lure employees out of their cubicles and encourage “chance collisions” that become brainstorming sessions.
But the concept of “water cooler innovation” may be overblown, says Christy Lake, chief people officer at enterprise software maker Twilio.