Athira Sethu
Kochi, 1 October 2024
More companies are joining the return to office (RTO) drive in recent months. The pandemic and post pandemic practice of operating from remote locations, popularly termed as ‘work from home (WFH), is slowly fading. Even much touted ‘hybrid model’ of operation is slowly giving way to complete physical model, wherein employees have to operate from offices on all five working days of the week.
Several corporate giants have joined the race. The most noticeable among them is Amazon, which will make corporate employees work in the office for five days a week starting January 2, 2025. This marks a major shift from the previous hybrid model.
Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer, Andy Jassy, in a memo said the move was aimed at boosting teamwork and making company culture better. He said that teamwork gets a boost with physical presence of team members.
Not only Amazon, but also JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have returned back to work from office policies. According to reports, JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, said that he feels that workers may opt to leave the company if they do not like the new expectations regarding the offices. BlackRock and Citigroup have also asked their employees to work four days per week in the offices. Citigroup has mandated full-time attendance for many its US employees in offices.
IBM and Dell have also changed their work from home policies. IBM has made it compulsory for its managers to spend three days a week at the office since the beginning of this year.
Similarly, Dell has ended work from home for its global sales team. Dell has sent a memo to the global sales team, requiring them to be in office from September 30. “Action required. Return to office, return to winning,” the memo said.
This return to office is not limited to global corporations. Most Indian companies have asked their employees to operate from offices now. Companies operating in financial services, manufacturing, retail and others are already operating from offices since the beginning of the year.
Even Indian IT firms are slowly asking their employees to return to offices. India’s largest IT firm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has already implemented 5 days from office for its employees. Infosys also asked its employees to work from the office for a minimum of 10 days per month, which is equal to at least three days a week. HCLTech and Wipro also have similar policies for their staffers.
However, this trend is not without dissent. Thousands of employees from various sectors have organized petitions and expressed their protests against such demands.
The implications of return-to-office mandates are multilayered. While leadership argue that in-office work encourages teamwork and improves company culture, employees believe that such policies contribute to reduced morale and increased turnover.
Therefore, companies will have to strike the balance between office work requirements and employee satisfaction, and so far it remains to be seen how changes like these will redefine the worlds of workplaces and work.
