Zoom Mandates That Employees Return to the Office, Forgetting Those Workers are Also “The Market”

In one of the more ironic news stories to emerge recently, CNN Business reports that Zoom announced a new mandate for their employees: they “need to be onsite two days a week.”

Never mind that Zoom owes its success entirely to workers across industries working from home. It certainly isn’t the only company mandating a return to the office, whether in some hybrid form or full-time. Yet most companies haven’t really provided a solid reason as to why they “need” employees in the office for a specified amount of time.

Workers actually do better quality work more efficiently from home

Business News Daily reported on the numerous studies showing that employees given the opportunity to work from home are actually more productive than they were in the office. First, there’s the decrease in coworker or supervisor interruptions, frivolous meetings, and commuting time eating up work time. People who work from home actually spend more hours working over the course of a day.

Second, workers who are allowed to tend to their lives as needed are more likely to want to do a good job for an employer. An employee who isn’t afraid of being seen as “unproductive” or “not a team player” for needing to pick up their child from school, or care for a sick family member, or go to a doctor’s appointment is more likely to do their best work when they are at their desk.

Lastly, people who work from home report improvement in their mental health. Being able to get their work done in a way that best suits their work style and schedule decreases stress and allows for a greater work-life balance.

This doesn’t mean that stress goes away entirely. Working from home also means that one has to be intentional about setting boundaries around their “work hours,” lest all hours become work hours. Still, it’s easier to set those boundaries in one’s own home than it is to set them in the office, where bosses clearly have “home field advantage,” and it’s easier for them to over-micromanage employees’ every movement.

Why do companies insist that employees return to the office?

In an earlier piece, CNN Business revealed one halfway-decent reason companies have given to justify mandating a return to the office. Citing a “recent study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,” they report that while working from home delivers short-term productivity gains, it comes at the cost of nurturing the newest and most marginalized workers, who wouldn’t benefit from the in-person mentorship and collaboration that they’d supposedly have access to if they were in the office.

However, it’s not as if those new or marginalized workers had access to those things pre-lockdown. The piece says, “To executives who assert that innovation and mentoring are best fostered by more days in-person, Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, asks ‘How do you know? Did you measure it before?'”

Lister tells CNN Business that The Work Institute, a data-driven consulting firm that helps companies with employee retention, looked at data for 200,000 employees between 2010 and 2019 “and found that 38% of employees who leave an employer do so within their first year and another 17.5% do so in their second year. [R]oughly a quarter of employees between the ages of 20 and 29 cited career development as the biggest work-related reason for leaving, followed by work-life balance.”

Something that I’ve experienced throughout my own work life as a fat, neurodivergent Latina is that even in the best of times, I have to pursue career development because it’s rarely provided in an intentional way. Supervisors tend to get organically “chummy” with employees who are Like Them (which isn’t generally Like Me), and “chumminess” equals mentorship, which translates to career advancement. If I don’t consciously and constantly remind superiors I exist and want to level up, they’re often happy to let me continue doing solid work in the position I’m in without worrying too much about my stagnant pay, career growth, ambitions, or goals.

And this was when I was working in offices pre-COVID.

Fortune reported that as companies started mandating a return to the office, workers have quit in higher numbers than the companies thought, while companies that give employees the choice of whether to come into the office or not have retained and increased their workforces.

So, not only does productivity have little to do with where work is done, but allowing workers to choose when and whether they work from home actually improves productivity. So, why the insistence on returning to the office?

Companies see workers as “resources,” not humans.

There’s something patronizing about mandating that work happen in an office, as if employees are children that need to be minded. As if employers don’t trust that work is happening unless they can see it. Never mind that even before the COVID lockdown, office workers became adept at “looking busy” at all times despite only having about four hours of work to do in an eight-hour day.

Because God forbid you’re not working every single second of the day. Supervisors can’t have that. They want workers to be productive all the time. Hence “lunch hours” that are 30 minutes long, which, last time I checked, wasn’t an hour and often leads to employees working while they eat. When you’re in the office, you’re encouraged to be working. Always. Even if you’re taking your labor law-protected break. Companies only give you as much time off as they have to legally, no more.

So, workers adapted and learned how to look productive even as they’re being less productive in the office. Because companies want them to work smarter and harder. “Free time” is just time that hasn’t had work shoved into it yet.

In addition to the paternalistic need to see workers working in order to believe it, there’s also an economic reason employers want workers back in the office, though it has nothing to do with the productivity of those employees.

Forbes reported on the impact that employees working from home has had on large companies with office space in large cities:

“Empty office space is a money pit for landlords and companies that invested millions in purchasing, leasing and retrofitting office buildings to accommodate and attract workers. Rising interest rates, oversupply and declining demand are contributing to the potential downturn. The report also notes that the impact of the pandemic on the commercial real estate market has been significant, with many businesses struggling to stay afloat and many people choosing to work from home.”

The article then proceeds to rich-person-panic as only Forbes can about the way this is going to cause big city economies to spiral. If people work from home, no one will commute to cities and all the businesses that have opened up to serve those workers will have to close OH NO!

This doesn’t consider that many people currently live in these cities, and those that don’t might actually choose to once they can actually afford to. Also, businesses don’t need to exist in big cities. If more people live outside big cities, smaller businesses will open up to cater to the people in those places. Smart entrepreneurs remember that they are providing services for customers. Customers don’t exist to serve businesses.

Corporate America talks a big game about “the market” dictating everything when they want to justify choices that are abusive to workers, but when the market dictates that people want to work from home and be catered to there, suddenly the economy won’t be able to handle it.

It’s almost as if The Market is a made-up thing that doesn’t act on its own but is manipulated by the wealthy so they can stay wealthy.

(featured image: seb_ra/Getty Images)