An American multinational technology company, Google has implemented a three-day office and the company is also cracking down on office attendance.
Google will be tracking employees’ attendance. The company’s attempt is to bring employees back into physical offices. Additionally, the company will also be including the “three days per week” in the performance reviews.
In the U.S., the company has decided to track attendance using badge data. The new fully remote work will be granted only by “exception.”
In accordance according to the internal memos that were viewed by CNBC, Google’s chief people officer, Fiona Cicconi, wrote an email to employees, “There’s just no substitute for coming together in person.”
“Of course, not everyone believes in ‘magical hallway conversations,’ but there’s no question that working together in the same room makes a positive difference. Many of the products we unveiled at I/O and Google Marketing Live last month were conceived, developed, and built by teams working side by side”, Fiona Cicconi added.
Fiona Cicconi further added, “The company will start including their three days per week as a part of their performance reviews and teams will start sending reminders to workers “who are consistently absent from the office.”
“For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community”, Fiona Cicconi added.
Work from office of other IT companies
In the Month of January 2023, Tata Consultancy Services, in a bid to call its employees back to the office changed its appraisal system. The tech giant has sent an email to managers and team leads in the company which read, “Goal – Return to office; Target – Average 3 days a week from the nearest TCS office. I request all the appraisers to assign the below RTO (Return To Office) goal immediately to all your team members.”
The TCS spokesperson said, “We have encouraged employees to work from the office for three days a week, but it has not communicated any career or compensation implications for non-compliance.”
TCS said that almost 50% of employees are coming to the office thrice a week and that the company plans to take this number to 70-80%.
Accenture is encouraging employees to work from the office. It has instructed the Team Leaders and Managers to ensure their respective team members are working from their base locations by August 31, 2023.
Now, IT giants are cautious about their WFO policy and want employees to work from office at least 3 days a week. Recently we have also seen a couple of statements by business leaders and changes in the appraisal system to make employees work from Office.
The IBM CEO Arvind Krishna warns employees, said return to office or lose career opportunities. Remote work can hurt the career prospects of employees, especially in managerial roles.
He said, “Remote work is more suitable for certain roles that require individual work. In the short term, you probably can be equally productive, but your career does suffer.”
“Moving from there to another role is probably less likely because nobody’s observing them in another context. It will be tougher. Not impossible, but probably a lot tougher”, he added.
