When COVID-19 took over the planet in March of last year, and tens of millions of Americans were forced to work from home, some feared total anarchy. Productivity, the theory went, would drop. Employees’ ability to interact—to collaborate, to meet and discuss strategies, to be creative in groups, to reach important deadlines—would falter. Executives and CEOs I spoke to at the time worried that their employees would morph into indolence, video gaming, sleeping in, Netflixing and chilling.
In fact, they needn’t have worried. Programs like Zoom and Airtable, and invisible tech like automation and A.I. at work in the background, allowed people, and in turn businesses, to thrive in their new environs. Productivity began to rise, and is expected to continue to do so in the coming years, prompting the question: Are offices all they’re cracked up to be? Now, with about half of the adult population of the United States vaccinated, executives are facing the conundrum of whether, and how, to lure their workers back to the office—and employees are debating the extent to which they’ll comply.
In most instances, the people I’ve spoken to are doing everything they can to not be called back to the physical office. “I’ve been just as productive—actually more productive—working in the middle of nowhere than I was on campus in the Bay Area,” one Google employee who moved to a remote farm during the pandemic told me. “My teammates are strewn all over the planet, I think the last 18 months has proven that it makes no difference if I’m here or there.” A Hollywood producer told me that, at first, he dreaded the idea of not being able to attend meetings in person, but halfway through the pandemic he gave up his company’s office (a $500,000-a-month expense) and now hosts meetings by taking long walks on the beach or hiking the trails in Malibu. “I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the office,” he told me.
One major factor that most tech companies haven’t publicly addressed, especially in the face of ongoing deaths and mass unemployment, is that their workers were able to cash out in unimaginable ways during the pandemic. Many used that money to move to their dream homes around the globe. Twitter saw the value of its stock double since March 2019 and some employees were able to buy multimillion dollar homes in far-off locales, according to a former employee close to the company. At Amazon, whose market capitalization has doubled since January 2020 to almost $2 trillion, employees saw their options increase by hundreds of millions of dollars and bought new homes nowhere near Seattle, moving to more remote locales where—as one employee joked—they can still get everything delivered via Amazon Prime.
A founder close to several Facebook employees (where the company’s valuation also doubled since spring 2019), told me that, for whatever reason, some employees there have moved to more tropical areas, specifically Palm Springs, Hawaii, and Miami. (Even Mark Zuckerberg did this, spending periods of the pandemic on his multi-hundred-acre property on Kauai’s North Shore, where he’s become slightly obsessed with his electric surfboard.) The same is true for some journalists, editors, and book publishers, who departed for country houses upstate, the woods of Connecticut, or homes in Los Angeles far from their respective newsrooms. The Hamptons and the jagged coastline of Monterey, California, became home to hedge fund managers. They’ve all settled into new lives, which—let’s be honest—are far more luxurious than the cramped urban lives they used to lead. “The Hamptons is going to sink because there’s so much traffic,” said one person who has witnessed the chaos in the Hamptons. The “hedgies,” as people often call the bankers, are helping drive up the prices of housing, where a single unremarkable house is now renting for as much as $50,000 for two weeks.
For most media and Hollywood types, the office wasn’t much to brag about: a mishmash of cubicles and meeting rooms, with a second-rate coffee machine and an old water cooler. But tech companies’ multimillion-dollar campuses are specifically designed to keep employees from leaving, with on-site gyms, catered meals, fun little scooters and bikes to zip around on, and countless other amenities. The purpose and future of these spaces is an existential question. “We have these campuses that are hundreds of thousands of square feet big, with dry cleaners, and massages, and bus systems to get our employees to the office and back. Do they shut all that stuff down?” asked one tech executive.
Right now, the executive said, employees are trying to come up with reasons why they shouldn’t have to return.“I think it’s going to be a slow transition,” the executive said, “but I do think, eventually, most employees will come back, at least in a part-time capacity.”
For now, each company is taking a different approach to the great return. Twitter, which led the charge in telling employees they could work remotely, has no plans to ask employees to return to the office in a full-time capacity. Microsoft has made major changes to allow for more remote work and is leaving much of the decision-making to individual managers, with many employees adopting a hybrid model of working from home and coming to campus occasionally. Some groups within Netflix are asking their employees to come in on alternate days. Mark Zuckerberg said last year that remote workers could make up as much as 50% of Facebook’s workforce in the next decade. Some divisions of Google, according to one person who works for the company, are deciding who has to return on a case-by-case basis.
As with most things in Silicon Valley, this new era of work will almost certainly lead to new forms of competition. Going forward, tech companies will likely be forced to offer new hires increased options to work remotely. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, and others often throw stock options at programmers in the hopes of luring them away from competitors. Their campuses, with all their perks, were the proverbial cherry on top. Now, the idea of being stuffed back into cubicles is stifling. One employee of a major tech company who was recently enticed to come back to the office was offered a $500,000 stock bonus to be closer to campus, but ultimately chose to turn it down. “I’m happy with my life the way it is now, and I’m a hundred times more productive,” they said. “They can turn the campus into a museum as far as I’m concerned.”
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