Actually, Zoom’s In-Office Policy Shows the Power of Hybrid Work

tech.hindustantimes.com:

“Even Zoom Is Making People Return to the Office.” “End of an Era: Zoom Tells Employees to Return to Office for Work.” “The Remote-Work Revolution Is Officially Dead.”

It's easy to understand why Zoom Video Communications Inc.'s decision to ask employees to spend more time collaborating in person would make headlines. At first blush, it sounds a bit like “McDonald's Asks Employees to Go Vegan.” But even so, the drama is overblown. “End of an era” and “Officially dead”? From reactions like that, you would never know that the videoconferencing company has asked workers to come in just two days a week. What Zoom's decision really shows is that hybrid work — not fully remote work and not five-days-a-week in-person work — is the new normal.

Zoom's two-days-a-week threshold is backed by some data. A field experiment led by Harvard Business School professor Raj Choudhury suggests that one to two days a week in the office is “plausibly the sweet spot, where workers enjoy flexibility and yet are not as isolated compared to peers who are predominantly working from home.” In the study, workers who were randomly assigned to come in one to two days a week also seemed to show an increase in both the quality and quantity of their output, as measured by their emails and by their bosses' ratings.

While surveys do consistently show that bosses would prefer that their staff show up a little more than that, most companies seem to have settled on a norm of two to three days a week. Office attendance patterns haven't changed much over the past 12 months. And cellphone data, office badge swipes and building capacity all show that urban offices remain far emptier than before the Covid pandemic.

Some firms dictate the days teams have to come in, but