Remote work tech continues to evolve, but tech companies push RTO mandates

The war over workers returning to the office rather than working from home continues, but some of the recent battles suggest that the “work from the office” forces are gaining the upper hand.

Those forces are generally seen as employers and the corporate world, but the surprise is that companies bringing workers back to the office have included several tech companies that formerly championed work flexibility.

The movement stretches over many industries. Goldman Sachs announced in August that it was requiring employees to be in the office five days a week, after allowing work-from-home “summer Fridays;” an experiment that resulted in media reports of “totally dead” offices on Fridays.

And a recent survey from Resume Builder found that 90% of businesses leader polled said their companies would require that employers work from the office five days a week by the end of 2024.

There are a number of reasons given for bringing workers back to the office; often employers feel that in-person and team interactions are more productive when workers are in the office. But several experts noted that hybrid work is probably here to stay, and that workflow may improve with remote work, depending on the type of work being done.

A change in the tech world

There is some irony seen in the fact that the return-to-the-office trend has spread to the tech world, which has often been an innovator in flexibility for workers. In one eye-opening announcement, social media giant X (formerly Twitter) recently mandated that employees work from the office at least 40 hours a week.

Others are still allowing remote work but pushing for more hours from the office. In August, Zoom, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the remote work boom, told employees that if they live within 50 miles of their office, they must work from the office at least two days a week.

Zoom officials emphasized that the company still supports hybrid work; but that having employees in the office has benefits that cannot be completely replaced. “We believe that a structured hybrid approach – meaning a set number of days employees that live near an office need to be onsite – is most effective for Zoom,” the company said in a statement.

Some industry observers note that the problem has been building for some time, as the country returns to more normal routines and practices.

Mark Mortensen, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, wrote in the Harvard Business Review about increasing tensions between workers and employers over the issue, noting that a number of companies are struggling to balance their desires for a productive office environment with workers’ preference for more flexibility.

“Consider, for example, the contingent of Amazon workers who staged a walkout to protest the company’s office policies, or Farmers Insurance employees’ threats to unionize or quit in response to the CEO reversing the company’s remote-work policy,” he wrote. “Google recently began tracking employees’ in-office attendance, and stories of employees being terminated for failing to adhere to RTO policies continue to proliferate. Neither side holds all the power, and as the conversation becomes more and more polarized, it becomes more difficult to reach a mutually beneficial resolution.”

The solution is… more tech?

Some argue that the clash over whether and how much to work from home is a sign that the technology involved, which had to make a significantly big jump quickly in responding to the pandemic, may not have caught up with the needs of both employers and workers.

Neeha Curtis, VP of Global Communications at Jugo, a virtual meeting platform, blamed outdated technology for some of the dissatisfaction that employers have for remote work. “The reason for the current push to return to the office and the increased craving for face-to-face interactions boils down to one fundamental problem: the video-calling tools we’re using don’t align with how we want to interact as humans.”

Curtis said the remote meeting technology used by many in the workplace is stifling the personal interaction that the office can provide—but that better solutions are being developed. “Without physical presence and cues, meetings can feel disconnected and impersonal, and are often inefficient,” she added. “We need a new solution for how we work today. Remote and hybrid work won’t – and shouldn’t – go away. Instead, what needs to go is the archaic technology that isn’t rising to the occasion. We need tools that meet the moment and technology that adapts to our human needs.”

This fits with some recent research—in a paper for Journal of Economic Perspectives, three researchers, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, wrote that the explosion of remote work has run into some predictable problems and backlash, but that our understanding of the experience is still evolving. The researchers have published several research papers on the WFH Research site, which was founded to study the changes to the workplace brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

One takeaway from the report is that the remote work can be more productive when compared to in-person work—but that it can depend on the type of work. “These results suggest that brainstorming activities benefit from in-person meetings, but some other aspects of the innovation process do not,” they write. “[Research] suggests that in-person communications are particularly valuable in the early stages of the innovation process but less so in later stages and in technical tasks.”

Related: RTO ‘tug-of-war’ between employers and remote workers

The researchers conclude by saying they anticipate a steady or slowly rising work-from-home rates over the next several years. However, they add that the outlook for fully remote jobs is “less secure” than that for hybrid work.

“We are optimistic about the outlook for the pace of innovation, at least as it relates to working arrangements,” the study said. “The same developments that facilitated a big shift to work from home also created greater reach and higher quality in one-way and two- way communications at a distance. These include the rise of the internet, better broadband infrastructure, better videoconferencing, the emergence of the cloud, and better software tools for remote collaboration… The new element is that firms now have better information about which jobs and tasks are well suited for remote work.”