How ironic: Zoom calls its employees back to the office

Now we’re coming full circle . Zoom is telling its employees to come back to the office

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is lesson 605 of Plain English, and that means JR has uploaded the full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/605.

Coming up today: Zoom—the company that made remote work possible and popular—Zoom is calling its own workers back to the office. And they’re onto something: it turns out the productivity benefits of remote work are not quite what they once seemed.

In the second half of the audio lesson, I’ll show you what it means to “come full circle.” And JR has a song of the week. Let’s get going.

Zoom, telework champion, calls its workers back to the office

It’s often said that a brand has really made it when the brand’s name becomes a verb: Uber, Google, Photoshop, Xerox. They’re all actions as well as company names. In the early days of the pandemic, a little-known teleconferencing service achieved that level of fame almost overnight : Zoom.

It became so common that we even began talking about “Zoom fatigue .” I suppose a whole other level of infamy comes when your company name is associated with a disease! But I digress.

Zoom came to symbolize the potential of a fully remote future. Would we ever go to offices anymore? Could we live from anywhere? Would we never have to commute again? Could we ditch our business attire? We’ll just do all our work on Zoom.

Well now, three years after COVID upended the world of office work, Zoom itself is calling its workers back to the office. The champion of remote work says it wants its own workers in the office two or three days a week. They’re calling it a “structured hybrid” approach—and that word “structured” is key. It’s the opposite of “flexible” and it means the in-office part is not optional.

Is Zoom waving the white flag ? The company’s stock is down over 80 percent from its pandemic high. And many of its clients—the world’s big companies—are souring on the idea of fully remote work.

But wait : didn’t a slew of studies from during the pandemic prove that working from home was more productive than working in the office?

Not so fast. The evidence that working from home boosts productivity was never that strong. One commonly-cited study comes from a Chinese company in 2013. It found that call-center workers were 13 percent more productive when they had shifted to remote work. But a lot of that productivity increase came from workers putting in longer hours at home than in the office—sound familiar?—and the company eventually cancelled the remote work program.

What about more modern studies? During the pandemic and its aftermath, many remote work champions pointed to a study that found an eight percent increase in productivity among customer service staff for an online retailer.

Sounds good, right? The online retailer had recently shifted from all in-office work to all remote work, and the study found an eight percent increase in productivity. The study was published in 2020, just as remote work took over the white-collar world. It nicely confirmed what people wanted to believe at the time .

But in May 2023, the authors published a revised version of the study, this time using more complete data. Instead of an eight percent increase in productivity, they found a four percent decrease in productivity.

They’re not the only ones. A study of data-entry workers in India found workers were 18 percent less productive at home. A study of an Asian IT firm found a similar difference.

It gets worse. These studies all measure quantitative productivity—how many calls does a customer service agent take? How many tickets does an IT professional close? But there is more to work than quantitative measures of productivity.

Microsoft Teams is a software package that combines instant messaging with meetings and file sharing. By analyzing a worker’s activity on Teams, researchers can tell if that person’s professional network is growing or stagnating.

A study found that workers’ professional networks were more static when they were working remotely. Another study found that “weak ties” dropped by 38 percent. “Weak ties” are casual work acquaintances that might not be crucial to your everyday job but are important to building a career.

Making connections matters in modern knowledge work—but that’s exactly what suffers in a fully remote environment.

Other studies have found what many executives knew by instinct: that new joiners and younger workers weren’t learning as much in a fully remote world. One study found that remote work decreases the amount of feedback junior employees get—a key part of their own career development and of management in general.

And industries that require teamwork and creative solutions also suffer: I don’t care how many times Zoom updates its “virtual whiteboard,” it is no substitute for a team working in person at an actual whiteboard.

Zoom is one of dozens of companies to implement stricter attendance policies. Google will use badge data to evaluate employees that don’t show up three days a week. Amazon, Apple, Meta, Lyft, and others are doing the same.

I always thought—I mean, I knew in my heart—that remote work was a lifestyle benefit. People who say, “Oh, I’m so much more productive at home” – they’re talking about feeling more energized, getting personal errands done, and balancing it with work. That’s great, but that’s not an increase in productivity: that’s a lifestyle benefit.

So the health benefit of working from home, the safety part, is over. The productivity benefit has been debunked. It still is a lifestyle benefit—people like the flexibility to pick up their kids, exercise in the afternoon, or sneak a power nap . But it does look as though more companies are going to crack down on in-office time.

JR’s song of the week

This is incredible. JR’s song of the week is “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins. He didn’t know the topic of today’s story, but he still managed to pick a song that goes along with the topic. “Footloose” is about someone who’s bored working all day and wants to go out dancing—let his feet loose on the dance floor.

Here’s how the song starts: “Been working so hard, punching my card, eight hours for what?” And then he sings, “Tonight, I gotta cut loose, footloose.”

Punching a card is a metaphor for going to an hourly job. You used to actually have a card—I had one as a teenager—and you’d put your card into a machine and punch in and punch out. The punch was the machine stamping the time on your card, so you could get paid for not a minute more and not a minute less than you worked.

Anyway, JR’s song of the week is a classic from 1984, “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins.

Next up, today’s expression: “Come full circle.”