Zoom heads back to the office

During the early months of the pandemic, a certain company went suddenly from relative obscurity to the type of popularity that made it a noun, verb and catchphrase.

“Can you set up a Zoom for us?”

“Let’s just Zoom.”

“I have Zoom fatigue.”

Revenue for the video conferencing company soared in 2020 – a jump driven by the millions of people who started working from home. Zoom was also part of the remote work shift that it powered, with most of its employees permitted to work from home.

But now, joining a swell of other tech firms pushing for in-person work, Zoom is requiring many of its 7,400 employees to start showing up at the office.

The company last week asked all employees within 80 kilometres (50 miles) of an office to work in person on a part-time basis, a plan Zoom said it would roll out in August and September.

“We believe that a structured hybrid approach – meaning employees who live near an office need to be on site two days a week to interact with their teams – is most effective for Zoom,” a company spokesperson said.

In 2020, participants in daily Zoom meetings leapt to more than 300 million, from 10 million the year before, as it became the most downloaded free iPhone app of the year. But the company has struggled to maintain its pandemic growth.

In February, amid a wave of lay-offs across the tech industry, Zoom cut 15 per cent of its staff, or about 1,300 people. The company’s workforce had grown more than 275 per cent between July 2019 and October 2022.

Dozens of companies have joined Zoom in tightening their policies on office attendance this summer, as offices remain at just under half of pre-pandemic occupancy levels.

Google, which has asked employees to come into the office three days a week, announced that managers could take unexcused absences from the office into account when doing performance reviews and could use badge records to identify those absences.

Salesforce, taking a softer approach, said it would give a $10 (€9.10) charitable donation per day on behalf of any employee who came into the office for a 10-day period in June. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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