Tech companies are the most well positioned to keep working from home – and have even created the tools to do so. Yet they’re urging workers back to the office.
Why? Control. Up goes childcare fees, up goes traffic in the cities, up goes vehicle depreciation and unproductive work time.
In Australia, there’s a movement by major city-based companies to return to the pre-Covid days and shackle their staff to their desks five days a week.
It’s being led by some major businesses and has the support of Peter Dutton, following in the footsteps of Donald Trump.
Two-thirds of chief executives see workers returning to the office five days a week within the next three years as the hunt for talent slips down the list of management priorities, according to a KPMG survey.
Last August, Grindr in America gave its workers a return-to-office ultimatum: either agree to work twice a week in person from October, or lose their jobs.
Grindr’s decision to implement such a strict return-to-office protocol – and willingness to lose nearly half of its staff – has come as a shock to many people.
Digital-first companies are better positioned to work remotely, and generally pride themselves on their adaptability.
Yet Grindr isn’t the only tech company that’s drawn a line through fully remote working patterns.
Elon Musk ended working from home for employees at Twitter (now X) in November 2022 after mandating they work in person at least 40 hours a week.
In recent months, Big Tech companies, including Amazon, have also stiffened their hybrid-working mandates. Among the highest-profile and surprising return-to-office tech announcements was at Zoom.
In August, the video-conferencing platform – synonymous with remote work – announced that workers living within 50mi (80.5km) of an office now must work in person at least twice a week.
Whatever your personal preference, and whatever its cons and pros, working from home seems to be morphing into a football for the culture wars.
Broadly speaking, the right, with its boss-and-business focus, is lining up on the side of “forcing” workers back into the office.
The left, with its interest in the rights of working people, and particularly women workers, is lining up on the WFH side.
Sniffing the Trump zeitgeist, this week the Peter Dutton announced it would force public servants back into the office five days a week.
A Coalition government would expect all public servants to work from the office five days a week, with exceptions “where they work for everyone rather than be enforced on teams by an individual”.
In a wages deal struck in 2023, the Albanese government granted the Commonwealth Public Service Union the right to uncapped WFH days, with the employer obliged to adopt a bias to approving requests to work from home.
That agreement does not expire until 2027, but when it does, the Coalition would seek to change the terms, so the default for federal public servants is they work from the office five days a week.
Working-from-home arrangements have been a boon for women and for Australia’s economic growth.
As Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood told the AFR’s Business Summit this week: “We have seen, in the last two years, the increase in women working full-time is bigger than the 40 years prior. I don’t think we can ignore those benefits.”