A few months into the coronavirus pandemic, several companies decided to make the new normal permanent and encourage their employees to work remotely for good.
Twitter was one of them. So was Facebook. Both social media giants have given their employees permission to work from home for the next several years if they’d like, and over at Twitter, employees can even work remotely “forever” if they so choose. Other companies have followed suit and decided to forgo renewing their office leases, giving up a physical collaborative space entirely.
So far, this experiment seems to be going well. But smaller companies are already arguing that the present work-from-home model cannot and will not last.
“There’s sort of an emerging sense behind the scenes of executives saying, ‘This is not going to be sustainable,’” Laszlo Bock, chief executive of startup Humu and the former human resources chief at Google, told the Wall Street Journal.
Productivity is beginning to level off, and it’s becoming harder and harder to complete projects and make decisions quickly, according to several business executives. In San Francisco, for example, a tech startup called Chef Robotics said it missed a crucial production deadline because all of its engineers were scattered across the Bay Area. The company quickly realized that the only solution was to head back to the office, according to its CEO, Rajat Bhageria.
But because of new health regulations, returning to the office isn’t always an option. And many companies are discovering that if they plan to return any time in the near future, they’ll have to adopt a hybrid model and allow employees to work from home a few days a week, every other week, or according to some other alternating schedule. Which means that remote work is here to stay for a long while yet — even if it doesn’t work.
