There's tone deaf and then there's what that guy said.

If I were head of a paying customer of Zoom, I'd probably be directing my CTO to start looking at alternatives like WebEx or even just the free Teams you may already have as a result of your Office license.

If I were a Zoom board member, I'd be thinking maybe it's time for a new CEO.

Came here to say the same thing. Hope he has his resume dusted off because if I were Microsoft, WebEx, Glance, or any of the other screen sharing companies out there I'd be running some advertising right now...

Why do I read this and keep thinking "Ratner"?

Drat! You beat me to it

Feel free to join it.

I thought "Stephen Elop"

I suspect his words may be taken out of context here. As a productivity, remote work and disaster recovery tool, Zoom is awesome, and the benefits became very apparent during the pandemic.

But he's 100% correct that it comes at a cost to employee onboarding, and to spontaneous conversations and innovation around the office.

Programmers use "talk to the duck" as a proven problem solving tool. Quick conversations around the office have huge value for building team spirit, solving problems, and fostering creativity.

The challenge a CEO faces is how do you balance both. How do you take advantage of the employee benefits from remote work, and the productivity gains in focus time, but also foster a healthy atmosphere around the office.

My instinct on this is that a middle ground is likely the best approach, with a couple of "office" days a week, and employees encouraged to be in the office more often than not on those days.

You're just expressing your personal opinion, so I won't jump on you or anything for it, but I do disagree.

I started a job during the whole lockdown period and then maybe half-way through the contract they started doing the whole hybrid thing. Considering the person I worked with the most was still several hundred miles away it changed basically nothing there, and even among those I worked with on a less regular basis, even though they were probably within 20ft of me, we still primarily communicated via Slack. There were the occasional discussions on the way to/from conference rooms, but honestly most of it was stuff I'd classify as "nice to know, but not really necessary."

There were a couple of times where I was doing some VBA work and one of my coworkers would occasionally stop by my desk to be a sounding board, but that technically wasn't part of my job. More like something I was forced to do in order to actually do my job because the company was too cheap to give us the proper tools and/or enough bodies to handle the workload. I honestly cannot think of a single time where I have ever learned something that was in any way vital to my job having random conversations with coworkers in the office. Sometimes training is a little better in person, and it can be nice to be able to put a face to a name and voice, but these are again "nice to have" type things and not in any way necessary.

Thanks for contributing Elon.

P.S. "VBA work"? Visual Basic for Applications?

Indeed, Visual Basic for Applications. A shit solution to be sure, but better than the alternative of doing everything by hand. Also literally the only even remotely viable solution we had, and probably only because the IT department was too lazy to go in and make sure it wasn't part of the standard image.

"I honestly cannot think of a single time where I have ever learned something that was in any way vital to my job having random conversations with coworkers in the office. "

I found the opposite to be true. Sometimes I picked up valuable tips that I could use and vice-versa. When you're a member of a small group of highly skilled techies there is often valuable information to be learned from each other and that often comes from random unstructured conversations, even when you are all working on different projects.

We have a developer group chat for that. Someone asks a question, someone will know the answer. And there's far more chance of getting an answer than hanging round the water cooler.

And thanks to the group chat we also have a record of common problems and solutions (or we would if Teams were any good at searching).

with a couple of "office" days a week, and employees encouraged to be in the office more often than not on those days.

The employees have discovered that work without commuting is possible. They're now going to regard those office days as punishment. It would be interesting if those in favour of the office would tell us how long their commute is and what the conditions are like. I've long believed that those who think public transport is a good way to commute live close to a bus or train route that also passes close to their place of work with no need to change.

"public transport"

When I used to commute to Nottingham via public transport it used to take nearly two hours to get there: 20 minute walk then wait 5-15 minutes for the train then wait 5-20 minutes for the bus then ten minute walk.

Via car it got it down to a hour. Bought a motorbike and got it down to 30 minutes.

> I've long believed that those who think public transport is a good way to commute live close to a bus or train route that also passes close to their place of work with no need to change.

Before moving counties and gaining a 35 mile each way commute up the motorway, I was happily commuting by bus (and didn't even own a car until the last couple of years of bus-riding; didn't feel the need[1]). The first job's route required one change and only a five minute walk at each end, the next job required a 15 minute walk and two changes (the middle bus being a city-to-city express) and so it went on.The best case was no bus needed, just a 20 minute walk (I have absolutely no ability on a pushbike, before that gets suggested).

Aside from when doing the walking bits (which helped keep me a lot slimmer than now), read a lot of novels over those years.

Would I continue to do the same nowadays? Honestly: the village gets so few connections a day that it'd be a right palaver, so no. But if the service was as good as it used to be, even here, then probably: it'd be nice to read more novels again, one those days when one had to go in.

[1] then again, the train service used to be a lot cheaper so even long trips were viable without a car.

>> But he's 100% correct that it comes at a cost to employee onboarding, and to spontaneous conversations and innovation around the office.

Only if the processes haven't evolved to a remote work environment. Which is a leadership failure.

And seriously, "innovation around the office"? Is that even a thing, other than improving on your performative working skills (i.e., feigning work so you look busy while actually doing nothing of value to the company)?

>> Programmers use "talk to the duck" as a proven problem solving tool. Quick conversations around the office have huge value for building team spirit, solving problems, and fostering creativity.

Great, here we do this online via Google Meet and Chat, and it works great. And without bothering anyone who doesn't want to be involved, which is exactly what happened when we were still in the office.

>> The challenge a CEO faces is how do you balance both. How do you take advantage of the employee benefits from remote work, and the productivity gains in focus time, but also foster a healthy atmosphere around the office.

What need is there to foster "a healthy atmosphere around the office" when people simply don't want and don't really need to be there? And if you really believe the CEO does this because he worries for the wellbeing of his workers then I have a nice selection of bridges you might want to buy. Because it's nonsense.

The CEO doesn't give a damn about "office culture", whatever that means. What he's worried is that the very expensive commercial real estate his company signed into long-term leases for is impacting his bottom line, and if the office space isn't utilized by at least a certain degree then he can't use tax write-offs for the lease costs. Office space is expensive, and leases often run 10 years (and sometimes longer), so these are often Millions of $ we're talking about here.

This is the challenge the CEO faces, how to show sufficient utilization so the business can write off the leasing costs. He couldn't care less about a "healthy atmosphere around the office", that's not his level of problem anyways.

>> My instinct on this is that a middle ground is likely the best approach, with a couple of "office" days a week, and employees encouraged to be in the office more often than not on those days.

Sounds more like indecisiveness and an inability to use the large body of evidence we now have about remote working to adapt to a changing work culture.

And businesses around the world are already finding out that the insistence of in-office work costs them access to the very talent they so desperately need, leaving critical positions unfilled because the talent is no longer interested to waste hours for commuting into a dreadful space, often just to hold virtual meetings with people located elsewhere.

The only people that are often ready and willing to go back into the office are usually the under-performers, i.e., the ones which require micromanagement to get anything done and which are more a drag on than a real benefit for the business.

> "We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call."

I'm sorry, being friendly is a problem now? So you can't be sufficiently nasty in a Zoom call? Is it because your spittle can't reach the other participants' face? Is the lack of spittle hampering productivity?

> Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently lamented that the company's cloud unit offices were like a "ghost town" so he enforced a desk-sharing scheme to make the team feel the warm and fuzzies.

Or you could sell the office, if it's useless? Oh, wait, you'd have to sell it at less than what you paid for it. And that will make a red line appear on the balance sheet. And that would be bad. It's much better to just waste thousands of people's time and leave the office's remaining value locked in the form of walls and furniture, rather than liquidate it and do something profitable with the money instead.

"do something profitable with the money instead"

Or give it back to the investors if there isn't anything more profitable on the horizon.

"Or give it back to the investors"

More likely, split it up between the Board members ... Daddy needs a new dacha.

Now that you mention it... there HAVE been times where I wished I could reach into my screen and just throttle someone, or give them a good smack. Like someone who asked me to do something for them. I do so, ask them if they have any issues. A week goes by, I ask them again, still no response. Then at the end of the second week I close the ticket for lack of response, only for the person to THEN decide to respond maybe 10 minutes after I close the ticket. If that doesn't warrant a good smack upside the head, I don't know what does.

On a serious note, the research on this topic shows that the further removed you are from the other person, the less polite you will be. So, if the problem is a lack of civility, in-person meetings are the worst way to go.

And as far as real-estate goes, my rather simple solution is the following. Figure out what jobs need to actually be done in-person, like physically putting things together. Then survey all the remaining employees and find out how many actually want to work in the office. Budget for maybe an extra 10% for new hires who may want to work in the office or people who will be in town for a few days and need a place to park their arse. Then you let go of all excess capacity.

In a lot of places there's a shortage of housing and you have all these empty office buildings, so it wouldn't take too much work to turn them into apartments. Property owner gets money, there's an increase in housing, companies aren't paying for excess space for people to work in an office unnecessarily.

>> In a lot of places there's a shortage of housing and you have all these empty office buildings, so it wouldn't take too much work to turn them into apartments. Property owner gets money, there's an increase in housing, companies aren't paying for excess space for people to work in an office unnecessarily.

That would certainly be useful for addressing the housing shortage. Unfortunately it would also mean that the owners of these buildings would have to invest into remodelling for residential use, only to see a lot less income (it might even be below of what they can get from tax write-offs), and then there often also are zoning laws which prohibit using commercial real estate for residential purposes.

No. Therefore it's productive.

Making you commute to the office to talk to the rest of your geographically dispersed team via Teams or Zoom is, however, utter stupidity. I guess the managerial class haven't evolved from [1]Victorian workhouses (see photo).

[1] https://www.gold.ac.uk/news/economy-victorian-workhouse/

Actually, yes.

Several of my clients have banned zoom, teams, and other similar products, along with access to all social media. Makes it far, far too easy for humans to do what humans seem to do best ... fritter away the hours gossiping.

All report productivity is up. Way up for the companies which fired the middle-management who most actively opposed the new routine.

I've consulted for over 20 years, and in the past 15 almost all of it has been 100% remote. I had a contract once where I worked for two years alongside people who I knew, and knew me, as just a voice on the phone or a name on an email. Never met in person or every had any idea each other looked like. Didn't matter as far as establishing trust, that was done by ideas and results.

That said it is different having certain isolated people working this way while most others work in person versus having everyone work this way. Some people need that social factor of being around others, some people cannot (or will not) work effectively if there is no one "watching", as it were.

I don't think either 100% remote or 100% in office is best, but how to make the decision of who gets to (or has to, depending on your view of it) work remote versus who comes into the office, and how often, is a very difficult nut to crack. I can see why companies don't want to make those hard decisions and are instead trying split the baby and make everyone come in three days a week.

"some people cannot (or will not) work effectively if there is no one "watching", as it were."

I don't employ people who need micro-managing. I have employees to make my life easier, not harder.

Oh well, at least he has given all the competitors marketing departments plenty of new material for their next ad campaigns.

This could be difficult to exploit for Google, although Pichai was at least honest and admitted that RTO is really about showing use of the empty office buildings.