After revolutionizing remote work in times of pandemic: Zoom asks its staff to return to the office

Zoom, the company whose name has become Synonym of telecommuting during the pandemic, joins the growth trend back to the office . The company, based in San Jose, Calif., wants its workers to return to face-to-face work to “be more productive.”

The videoconferencing pioneer asks employees who live within a 50-mile radius of its offices to work on site two days a week , a company spokesperson confirmed in an email, the Associated Press reported. The statement said the company has decided that “a structured hybrid approach – meaning that employees who live close to an office must be on site two days a week to interact with their teams – is more efficient for Zoom.

“As a company, we are in a better position to use our own technology s, continue to innovate and support our global customers. We will continue to leverage the entire Zoom platform to keep our employees and dispersed teams connected and working efficiently,” the company said.

The new policy, which will be implemented in August and September, was first reported by The New York Times, which said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan responded to questions from employees unhappy with new policy during a Zoom meeting last week.

This new policy is a change from what the company established in early 2022, when it announced that the vast majority of your employees would be working from home . From this announcement, several working arrangements were created within the company: hybrid, where the majority of employees who lived a short distance away could come to the office occasionally, remote and in-person, who would have to go daily, if less than 2% of their workforce.

Zoom has had its own struggles as demand wanes after a service rebound caused by the pandemic . Shares of Zoom Video Communications Inc. have fallen sharply since the peak at the start of the pandemic, falling from $559 a piece in October 2020 to below $70 on Tuesday. THE shares fell more than 10% to start August. In February, Zoom laid off about 1,300 people, or about 15% of its workforce. Management team members they also reduced their salary 20% base for the next fiscal year and lost their bonuses for fiscal year 2023, CNN points out.

It’s the latest in a series of technology companies that reverse their flexible working policy. These last months, Google, Amazon and Salesforce have adopted similar policies , ending a Covid-era approach that gave employees more freedom to work from home. For example, Amazon demanded that its employees return to offices, when they had previously promised they would be permanently away, leading people to move to other cities.

Like Zoom, the Associated Press notes, many companies are asking their employees to only come into the office part-time, because hybrid work promises to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic . Since January, the average weekly office occupancy rate in the 10 major U.S. cities has hovered around 50%, falling below that threshold during the summer months, according to Kastle Systems, which measures occupancy across entrance pass.

In July, about 12% of workers in the United States worked entirely remotely , while another 29% had hybrid policies, according to a survey that Stanford University researchers and others have conducted monthly since the pandemic. This resembles trends recorded earlier this year by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, reports MDZ Online.

Previous research by the Stanford team revealed that remote work is more common in English-speaking countries and much less common in Asia and Europe. Before the pandemic, the proportion of the number of days worked from home in the United States was only 5%.