I came across comments made by the Chief People Officer at Zoom about the success of their return to office initiative. The painful irony of this is that the man himself works remotely and has been for quite some time. The good news is he wasn’t granted some individual single exception. Zoom’s RTO mandate states that anyone living within 50 miles of one of their corporate offices must go work in that office. There are likely hundreds of people at Zoom still fitting that description. Still, if you’re one of the ones receiving a benefit that not everyone gets, the smart move is to keep your head down and mouth shut. Instead:
“I think I can manage people at Zoom effectively while working fully remotely,” he said in the interview. “I go into the office from time to time, obviously, for my role, but the majority of the time, I’m home.”
It takes a level of willful delusion usually reserved for politicians to be in the C-suite of a company requiring employees to work from an office while rarely stepping foot in one yourself, and then he took it even further by lauding the results in an interview.
To be abundantly clear, I respect that both sides of this conversation have valid points. I’ve been working remotely since March 2020 and it’s been a great boon for my life and career. I’ve gotten more time back in my day and don’t have to deal with daily road rage of a long commute. It would be a wild adjustment for me to return to working in office five days a week.
I’ve also had a job in which I managed people that really did not want to work, and if I took my off of them for a minute productivity would come screeching to a halt. There are certain roles and employees that can thrive remotely, and some that absolutely require an in-person presence. I will admit I’m not wise enough to be able to discern which job falls into which category, and I imagine the leadership of most companies is in the same boat hence the application of very broad policies.
It was just recently I was reminiscing with a friend about our time selling full time from the office. I asked him, “did we really come to the office to host Zoom meetings all day with our cameras off?” It’s been so long I had legitimately forgotten. But the answer was yes, we absolutely did. We’d roll up to our desk at eight in the morning, log into our systems, and then tap on our keyboards throughout the day and every now and then meet with potential customers over Zoom with our cameras off. Now that we’re all remote everyone seems more inclined to keep their cameras on, so in a way it’s even more personal now than it used to be.
I digress. It’s understandable why Zoom mandated a return to office. They were a decently growing software company in a rapidly growing space that absolutely blasted off when everyone had to go home for two weeks to flatten the curve. I still can’t imagine how good life must have been to be on the Zoom sales team in Q1 of 2020. But ever since June of 2022 their revenue has been absolutely flat. In a world where investors demand constant growth this is anathema.
As such, it stands to reason that Zoom leadership had to do something to show the board and investors they were making changes to bring that trend back up, even if that something had no tangible impact. Microsoft Teams has been making inroads and stealing business away while the lull in the white collar job market means no one is buying additional seat licenses. Zoom is in a position that is only talked about in hypotheticals. Anyone who has ever had to suffer through a product marketing pitch deck knows they like to throw out some arbitrary number of what their product’s Target Addressable Market is. Somehow Zoom sold to their entire TAM in the space of about two years, and now has practically on one left to pitch.
Back to the Zoom Chief People Officer. In the grand scheme of things it truly doesn’t matter. It’s not as though he alone has an exception to the policy– there are likely hundreds of Zoom employees that didn’t live near an office still working remotely. It’s just one of those things that leaves you baffled as to how a company’s Chief People officer can be so clueless. This was always a contentious issue creating a rift between the front line employees and the higher-ups, and there was no reason he had to do this interview. But for whatever reason that we may never know, he went and delivered some of the most tone deaf comments one could imagine.
Adding a little extra salt in the wound he chose to reopen is the reality that bringing the employees back to the office has had no tangible positive results. Since that mandate was put in place, quarterly revenue has increased by about 5%. In a space where anything under 10-20% has boards calling for C-Suite heads, these are eye-opening numbers. Seems like only a matter of time until the next round of operational efficiency layoffs, painfully delivered via Zoom.
