(Global TMT, June 10, 2022) -- The pandemic has changed many of the way people live, with telecommuting from home becoming a popular way of working during the pandemic. With the recurrence of the epidemic, many companies have had to postpone the return of employees to the office time and time again. This not only promoted the outbreak of remote office technology companies such as Zoom, but also made many people begin to think about "whether remote work is an inevitable change in the development of the Internet"; Questions such as "Does this way affect productivity?" In the technology industry, there are still many big names who have different attitudes towards "remote work". The theme of this issue of "TMT Big Names Says" is "telecommuting", let's take a look at the views of Tesla CEO Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and others.
Tesla CEO Musk sent two emails to employees on the evening of May 31, requiring employees to work at least 40 hours a week in the office or they would be defaulted to resignation. Musk wrote in the email that "everyone at Tesla must work at least 40 hours a week in the office" and "if you don't show up, we'll assume you've quit." Musk said: "The higher your position, the more you should let everyone see you." That's why I've lived in the factory for so long, so that people on the production line can see that I'm working with them, and if I hadn't done that, Tesla would have gone bankrupt long ago. He also stressed that the office "must be Tesla's main office, not a remote branch that has nothing to do with job responsibilities." ”
Musk doesn't like the efficiency of working from home. He complained on his personal Twitter: "How long have they [telecommuting companies] released great products, and if they want to create products that change the world, they can't communicate by phone." Musk also said bluntly: "Working from home during the epidemic makes people feel that they don't need to work hard." It's time to wake up! ”
"Workaholic" Musk was adamant about "telecommuting," and shortly after he called for a return to the office, a California-based union group slammed the plan.
In contrast, Apple CEO Tim Cook is more ambiguous about "telecommuting." In his view, the role of remote work had not yet been finalized. Cook said that while from his personal experience, face-to-face interactions between employees often lead to "surprise discoveries" and he personally prefers such studios, he also said that virtual interactions are "not inferior, just different from face-to-face interactions." "The telecommuting transformation we're working on is the 'mother of all experiments' because we don't yet know how it works," Cook said. He added: "We're piloting and trying to find a place that makes both ways best." ”
In fact, this is already Cook's attitude to "telecommuting" after Apple has been more strict in requiring employees to return to the office, and Ian Goodfellow, the company's former head of machine learning, has publicly stated that the company's return to the office policy is the main reason he chose to leave in May this year.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company's employees will not all use telecommuting in the future. "How productive are we when different teams that don't normally work together have to get together for a 'brainstorming,' creative process," he said. "We're going to have research, we're going to have research, we're going to have to learn from the data, we're going to learn what works."
Compared with the above three big names, many technology companies have shifted their office methods to remote work during the epidemic. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said Twitter's offices would reopen and hoped employees would return as soon as possible. But if employees want to, they can still work from home. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly announced that half of the company's employees will be allowed to work from home for the next 10 years. He said in a public video that the proportion of remote workers in the company will be greatly increased over the next 5 to 10 years, allowing 50% of the existing 45,000 employees to work from home for a long time. Microsoft currently supports employees to work in a hybrid, while Amazon has announced that it will allow employees to work from home indefinitely.
David Powell, president of Prodoscore, a provider of remote employee management services, is on the side of supporting telecommuting, saying, "After evaluating more than 105 million data points for 30,000 telecommuting users, we found a 5% increase in productivity from working from home during the pandemic." David Powell said, "Efficiency is not related to whether it is at home, but to the employees themselves." "According to the company's survey data, if employees are highly productive in the office, then they will also be efficient at home; If employees are lazy in the office, they do the same thing at home.