CNN Sees ‘Escalating Battle’ for Return to Office at Tech Companies

CNN explores tech companies’ efforts to limit remote work. “Salesforce is trying to lure employees into offices by offering to donate $10 to a local charity for every day an employee comes in from June 12 to June 23, according to an internal Slack message reported by Fortune.”

CNN notes a recent walkout at Amazon in protest of (partially) new back-to-office policies, as well as Meta’s upcoming three-day week at the office. But CNN adds that it’s Google that “has long been a bellwether for workplace politics in the tech industry and beyond” — and that Google recently announced plans to include in-person attendance in performance reviews.

“Overnight, worker professionalism has been ignored in favor of ambiguous attendance tracking practices tied to our performance evaluations,”[ads1]; Chris Schmidt, a software engineer at Google and member of the grassroots Alphabet Workers Union, told CNN in a statement. “The practical application of this new policy will be unnecessary confusion among workers and a disregard of our different conditions of life…”

Schmidt said even if you walk into the office, there’s no guarantee you’ll have people on your team to work with or even a desk to sit at. “Many teams are distributed, and for some of us there may not be someone to collaborate with in our physical office spaces,” Schmidt said. “Currently, workers in New York City don’t even have enough desks and conference rooms for workers to use comfortably.”
A Google spokesperson said its policy of working in the office three days a week “is going well, and we want to see Googlers connect and collaborate in person, so we limit remote work to exceptions only…”.