Big Tech’s products allow us to work remotely so why are they banning it?
Internet giant Google is the latest business to call time on remote and hybrid work. “Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only,” the company told workers in a memorandum from ‘chief people officer’ Fiona Cicconi, which is presumably Californian for ‘head of personnel’.
Unsurprisingly, the world’s largest data aggregator intends to enforce this with measures including tracking badge swipes.
Google is not alone. Meta Platforms issued similar marching orders at the start of this month. For the moment, the move is mostly an American phenomenon but it’s not just in the tech sector. TV chef and tycoon Martha Stewart recently said she was on a “rampage” to get people back into the office, saying the US could “go down the drain” if people continued working from home. Apocalyptic stuff.
Stewart also indulged in some classic US jingoism, comparing the land of eating lunch at your desk to France, saying the latter was “not a very thriving country” – something that came as news to this resident of France.
Stewart’s unguarded remarks let the cat out the bag: in true Jack Welch style, she just wants to squeeze unlimited juice out of workers.
“Look at the success of France with their stupid… you know, off for August, blah, blah, blah. That’s not a very thriving country. Should America go down the drain because people don’t want to go back to work?”
What France’s holiday regulations (which, for the record, are 2.5 days accured per month of actual work performed, in addition to public holidays) have to do with remote work is anybody’s guess. In addition, France’s, at least in comparison to the US, generous leave policy has not stopped the country being one of the most productive in the OECD. Compare this to the UK, which is rather more miserly with leave and has suffered from chronically low productivity for decades, in part due to ‘presenteeism‘.
Whatever about TV chefs, given that Google is one of the top providers of the cloud and collaboration software that has made remote work possible, it is worth asking just what is going on here. Why are giant corporations so desperate to see staff sitting in offices?
The real issue
A number of factors are at work, no doubt, but the biggest is a simple question of economics. Real estate, whether owned or leased, squats on the company’s balance sheet whether it is being used or not. As a result, it is in the interest of senior management to prove that they have not misallocated capital in the form of an empty building, which is effectively a field lying fallow.
None of which is to say that remote work is perfect. While it suits some people and has, by all accounts, raised productivity, there are downsides. First of all, it really can be isolating. Secondly, many of us have far from enough room to set up a dedicated work space.
Thirdly, it blurs the distinction between the public and private realms, allowing work to seep into what should be the sacred space of the home. In a way, this is as much of an unwanted intrusion as out-of-hours e-mails and text messages (which are banned in France, incidentally).
Indeed, if there is anything worse than frog marching workers back to the office under threat of P45s it is the pernicious trend of installing snooping software on their computers in order to track their every move.
So where does all of this leave us? To be honest, the long term future of remote and hybrid work is not clear to me, but one thing is: increasingly, the giants of the tech sector won’t eat their own dogfood.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers