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““It’s time to admit that remote work doesn’t work.””
Davis Sacks, venture capitalist and former PayPal Holdings Inc.
PYPL,
executive, doesn’t think remote work is getting the job done.
“It’s time to admit that Remote Work doesn’t work. WFH Friday is a 4 day work week. Full WFH is a 2 day work week,” Sacks wrote in a recent tweet. “Every interaction has to be scheduled, which means a lot of information-sharing doesn’t happen. Remote is a great lifestyle, not a way to build a great company.”
In addition to PayPal, Sacks was the founder of the enterprise social networking platform Yammer, which was acquired by Microsoft
MSFT,
in 2012 for $1.2 billion, and was an angel investor in Facebook
META,
Uber
UBER,
and Palantir
PLTR,
Sachs did not respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.
Sacks is not the only high-profile individual who has criticized remote work recently. Sacks’s friend Elon Musk has called it “morally wrong,” while adding, “the laptop class is living in la-la land.”
See also: Younger workers know being remote has drawbacks, but they don’t care. Here’s why.
According to a Pulse survey from Slack’s think tank Future Forum, employees with full schedule flexibility had 29% higher productivity scores than workers with no flexibility, and remote and hybrid workers had a 4% higher productivity than their in-office counterparts. That’s despite the lack of spontaneous discussion among in-office co-workers, which is a common critique of a remote-work environment
Another study, published in the Harvard Business Review, by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom, showed a productivity increase of 13% when employees opted to work from home.
But despite some of these findings, it’s still too early in the mass work-from-home and hybrid-working era to make a definitive conclusion on remote worker productivity.
Many employees have also wondered if remote workers may receive less recognition for their work, and potentially receive promotions or rewards at a lower rate.
“If your aspirations are to get that corner office, you probably have to move into an in-office role so you can spend the time schmoozing, networking, being front-of-mind, that sort of thing,” Shane Spraggs, CEO of Virtira, a business consulting and services company that has promoted remote work for over a decade, told MarketWatch. “And that can be a real consideration for a number of people.”
JPMorgan Chase
JPM,
Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said back in 2021 that working remotely “doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.”
From the archives (July 2021): ‘A lot of people are getting promotions — and most of them are in the office’
Support for the remote-work revolution that started at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be fading among leaders at some large companies across the U.S.
Companies like Google
GOOG,
Amazon
AMZN,
Apple
AAPL,
and Disney
DIS,
are among the several that have asked employees to come back to the office in at least a hybrid capacity over the last year. Some companies have even begun tracking office-badge swiping as a way to gauge employee attendance.
See also: Mark Zuckerberg says Meta may be ‘primary beneficiary’ of Apple Vision Pro headset
Even some high-profile remote-work supporters, however, seem to be changing their tunes. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce
CRM,
said in 2021 that “the 9-to-5 workday is dead,” but last month he indicated that new hires perform better at the office, while adding that he’s pushing for some workers to come in three days a week.
About 64% of workers say they would consider quitting if required to return to the office full-time, a 2022 ADP report showed.
