By Nick Pasion – Reporter, Puget Sound Business Journal Oct 9, 2024 Microsoft, the third largest employer in Washington, reportedly has no plans to call its employees back to the office five days per week. The company’s commitment to a flexible work policy, which was first reported by Business Insider, is somewhat surprising considering it’s nearly six years
Remote-work options are rapidly disappearing
Bethany Bickley / ACBJ; Getty Images Marq Burnett – Associate Editor, The Playbook, The Business Journals Sep 2, 2024 The days of widespread, fully remote work may be coming to a close. That’s according to a new survey from ResumeBuilder, which found 87% of companies that had been fully remote will return to the office by 2025.
Letting people work from home is good for companies’ revenue growth
By Matthew Boyle Bloomberg Companies that allow remote work have experienced revenue growth that’s four times faster than those that are more stringent about office attendance, a new survey shows, adding fuel to the debate over productivity and performance in today’s workplaces. The analysis of 554 public companies that employ a collective 26.7 million people
Return-to-office is a $1.3 trillion problem few have figured out
By Matthew Boyle Bloomberg News In the emerging post-pandemic era, most aspects of life have returned to normal. Moviegoers are flocking to cinemas, vacationers jammed airports for summer travel and kids are returning to classrooms. The one thing that has remained stubbornly fraught: the world of work. Three and a half years after millions of
As office returns ramp up, workers are commuting more — and it’s costing them
By Andy Medici – Senior Reporter, The Playbook, The Business Journals Aug 31, 2023 If time is money, then commutes cost the average U.S. worker thousands of dollars a year. As the back-and-forth over a return to the office continues, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculated the cities with the costliest commutes by comparing the average commute time in each
Amazon is wrong — a return-to-work mandate is about control
Heather Snavely Special to The Seattle Times Recently, The Seattle Times reported that an Amazon executive said that it was serendipitous to return to the office but had no data to back that up, even going so far as to say “actual data … it’s very hard to come by” and especially “any data that […] would
Workers resisting the office grind are suddenly lonely at home
By Irina Anghel Bloomberg Three years after the pandemic closed down offices around the world, the remote-work revolution has morphed into a tug of war between frustrated bosses and fed-up staff. While workers don’t want to give up flexibility, leaders want teams back to boost collaboration and avoid a productivity slump. The impasse is the
Return to Office Enters the Desperation Phase
The next stage of getting workers back at their desks includes incentives like $10 to the charity of their choice — and consequences like poor performance evaluations if they don’t make the trek in. For 10 days, Salesforce is giving a $10 charitable donation per day on behalf of any employee who comes into the
Seattle’s 5 largest tech employers agree: It’s return-to-office time
When several hundred Seattle Amazon.com Inc. employees staged a walkout on May 31, it was in part over the company’s stricter return-to-office policy that went into effect at the beginning of May. Its requirement that employees work in the office three days a week meant Amazon’s 65,000-employee local corporate and tech workforce have had to resume
Getting rid of remote work will take more than a downturn
As the economy slows, a handful of prominent CEOs have tried to put an end to remote work. But some economists say that even in a cooler labor market, working from home is likely to remain common. (Jared Oriel/The New York Times) By Sarah Kessler The New York Times During the nearly three years since