Return to office inducements get tougher and more creative

Tech companies who pioneered remote work now are enforcing stricter return-to-office mandates amid layoffs and shrinking office footprints.

As economic headwinds begin to gust, a showdown of sorts — maybe we should call it a last stand — is developing over whether and how to intensify efforts to cajole people into returning to the office.

Tactics range from coercion — think performance reviews — to what we’ll charitably call a dignified form of begging. Few observers think hybrid work patterns will fade, but several major employers are drawing the line on how flexible they’re willing to be about work from home days.

On the coercion side of the scale, Google, who like many Bay Area tech giants has loosely enforced a three-days-per-week in-office policy for the past year, last week warned employees that “nonattendance” will be a metric in upcoming performance reviews.

When Google initiated its three-days-in-office policy in April 2022, the search giant relied on perks including gourmet meals — and a private concert by pop star Lizzo — to draw workers back to their desks at its HQ in Mountain View.

Now, Google is warning employees that it will be monitoring badge entry swipes to make sure workers show up on their designated in-office days. In a memo to employees, Google’s Chief People Officer — that’s what the search giant calls its HR director — offered this guidance to employees on the importance of in-office work:

“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,” Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi said in the memo.

“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,” Ciccone added.

San Francisco-based Salesforce, which has spent most of the past 12 months offloading nearly half the space at its two namesake HQ towers in the city — while hailing the benefits of the post-pandemic hybrid work paradigm — now is appealing to its employees’ better angels to get them to show up for work in person.

In a message to staff in the company’s #all-salesforce Slack channel first reported by Fortune, San Francisco’s largest tech employer announced a new program called Connect for Good: Salesforce will donate $10 to a local charity for each day an employee comes into the office from June 12 to June 23.

The company also will donate $10 to charity if a remote worker attends a virtual event. We don’t know if the next two weeks are when performance reviews are handed out at Salesforce; the tech giant didn’t provide a reason for limiting the offer to two weeks.

Salesforce employees have been asked to vote for their favorite local charities for the next two days, according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times. The company said it is hoping to raise more than $1M in donations through the effort.

With office occupancy levels stalled below 50% according to Kastle’s 10-city average, several corporate giants have moved to tougher enforcement of their return-to-office mandates, including Chipotle, Farmers Insurance, Lyft, Disney, Snapchat, Meta and Amazon.

Salesforce, which has laid off about 10% of its workforce this year, encouraged workforce interaction last year through a series of corporate retreats, including an event called Trailblazer Ranch held in Santa Cruz County.

When it announced last year that it was listing for sublease 412K SF of its Salesforce West office tower in San Francisco, the tech company said it was fully embracing its “Success from Anywhere, Careers Everywhere” strategy, giving employees a say in how much work they do in the office and making hybrid/remote work a permanent part of the corporate culture.

Related: Is 2023 shaping up to be the ‘year of the return to the office’? Not so much

In March, Salesforce abruptly changed course, mandating a three days a week office policy that stretches to four days for customer-facing employees. According to a report from CoStar, the workforce strategy shift was adopted in the face of pressure from activist investors who are demanding more efficiency and profitability from the company.

Google, which in April postponed plans to start building this year an 80-acre Urban Village in downtown San Jose, announced last month it is listing for sublease 1.4M SF in Mountain View and Sunnyvale.