Articles

TASA ID: 22108

One of the biggest challenges for companies in transitioning to remote work is how to handle layoffs. Having helped 21 companies transition to hybrid and remote work, I can attest that planning for the whole workers lifecycle, from onboarding to offboarding, is critical as part of effective remote and hybrid work strategies. 

TASA ID: 22108

“I would bet 10 percent or more of our remote staff, especially programmers, are working two remote jobs! We need to stop this before it escalates and get everyone back to the office.”

Thus, spoke the Chair of the Board of a Fortune 1,000 tech company when I met with the Board to help them figure out the company’s plans for permanent post-pandemic work arrangements. Having helped 19 organizations determine their hybrid and remote work plans, I heard such sentiments all too often.

So I asked him where he got his information. He told me he sits on other company boards: that’s what he heard from other board members, and he guesses the same thing goes on here.

TASA ID: 22108

If you give any leader the opportunity to increase their talent pool of potential employees by 15% - with all these new hires belonging to an underrepresented minority - they’d jump at the chance, especially given tight labor markets and CEO desires to increase headcount. Yet too few leaders realize that, according to the US government, people with disabilities are the largest minority group in this country, with 50 million - 15% of the population - living with disabilities.

Sure, many executives feel concerned by the extra investments involved in providing accommodations for people with disabilities. Yet these accommodations might not involve anything besides full-time remote work, according to a new study by the Economic Innovation Group think tank. The study found that the employment rate for people with disabilities did not simply reach the pre-pandemic level by mid-2022, but rose far past it, to the highest rate in over a decade. Remote work, combined with a tight labor market, explain this high rate, according to the researcher’s analysis.

TASA ID: 22108

As part of ongoing cost-cutting measures under new owner and CEO Elon Musk, Twitter is shutting down its Seattle offices and Singapore offices, instructing employees to work remotely. That’s despite Musk earlier claiming that remote workers are only “pretending to work” and banning remote work at Twitter upon taking it over in early November.

So what explains his change of heart? Apparently, it’s the costs associated with the company’s Seattle office, including rent but also services such as cleaning and security.

TASA ID: 22108

Shortly before the layoffs at Salesforce, Marc Benioff, cofounder and co-CEO of Salesforce, recently sent a company-wide Slack message complaining about the low productivity of recent hires made during the pandemic and asked, “Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture?” Salesforce permits a high degree of flexibility for employees: teams and their leaders make the choice about what kind of work arrangements suit their needs best. However, does such flexibility threaten the development and integration of recently hired junior staff?