As business leaders demand that their employees get back in the office to work, those employees are freaking out over the requirement. One such place where such a return to the office requirement caused employee outrage which is now reaching a fever pitch is search and advertising behemoth Google.
That company, CNBC reports, just instituted a three-day per week office work requirement, with employees having to swipe in with their badges to show that they showed up to the office at least three days a week. Whether the employee showed up the appropriate number of days is included in their performance review and those employees who currently have permission to work fully from home are having that status reevaluated.
The document describing how managers at Google are to get their non-remote employees back into the office, CNBC reports, says, “Managers of non-remote Googlers who have been consistently absent from the office will be cc’ed on emails to these Googlers (subject to local requirements), so they can support Googlers in either ramping back to the office or exploring other flexibility options.”
Predictably, Google’s employees are upset with that new system and feel like they are being treated as schoolchildren by the company. CNBC reports that employee outrage is being posted on an internal Google site called Memegen, with a particularly popular comment saying, “If you cannot attend the office today, your parents should submit an absence request.” Another popular post was a meme saying, “check my work, not my badge.”
Another meme reportedly poked fun at an incident that occurred in the YouTube division of Google. YouTube reportedly held an all-hands employee meeting about the new office requirement, but the YouTube executives presented the plan to employees virtually, drawing the scorn of those employees. CNBC reports that one meme about that incident showed the character Leonard Hofstadter from “The Big Bang Theory” saying, “What are you looking at? You’ve never seen a hypocrite before?”
Google isn’t the only company struggling to get employees back to work. In addition to numerous memos demanding that employees return to the office, both at Tesla and Twitter, he called remote work for white collar employees immoral. Speaking on that, Elon said, “I think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ’Let them eat cake.’ It’s not just a productivity thing. I think it’s morally wrong.”
Continuing, Musk pointed out how the system is unfair to those who must show up to work, particularly at Tesla where blue collar employees had to show up to the factory but white collar employees could work from home. Speaking on that, Elon said, “It’s like, really, you’re going to work from home and you’re going to make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory? You’re going to make the people who make your food… that they can’t work from home? The people that fix your house — they can’t work from home? But, you can? Does that seem morally right? That’s messed up.“
“People should get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bulls***,” Musk continued.
Similarly, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg demanded that employees return to work in a recent memo to employees, saying, “Our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.”
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