Remote work is increasingly a right of the rich

NEW DELHI: Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, once said, “I don’t work well in an office.” Which makes one wonder where he was when Salesforce’s employees were ordered to return to the office three or more days a week. Perhaps he was sequestered at his properties in the genteel upcountry of Hawaii’s Waimea district. Or maybe at his oceanfront estate, just down the hill.

In late October, Starbucks — under its newly minted leader, Brian Niccol — warned the coffee company’s corporate employees that they must also return to the office three days a week by January. Yet Niccol continues to make his primary home in sunny Newport Beach, Calif. Starbucks has provided him with dedicated office space, a local personal assistant and a corporate jet ready to fly him the 1,000 miles to and from the company’s world headquarters in Seattle. A company representative told CNBC that Niccol will be held to the same three days a week standard.

When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world in 2020, many of America’s office workers were suddenly able to work from home, introducing previously unimagined flexibility. They could move to more affordable locales, apply for jobs regardless of location and balance the demands of work and family. This privileged perk, however, opened a divide, as many essential workers still had to report to their stations.

Now growing numbers of the white-collar class are under increasing pressure to return, while many corner offices sit empty. The ability to work from home was always economically stratified. Now it is often being reserved for the wealthiest among us.

Research by the Stanford University economist and remote work expert Nick Bloom shows that postpandemic, the number of days people are allowed to work from home correlates to their income. Work-from-home days have fallen by 16 percent for workers earning $10,000 to $100,000 a year but only by 5 percent for those making $200,000 or more.

Perhaps that’s why Bloom found a correlation between income earned and distance from the office. Only 5 percent of employees earning $10,000 to $50,000 a year work 50 or more miles from their company headquarters, compared with 14 percent earning more than $250,000. The gap is growing despite research that concludes that working from home can benefit employees and employers alike. He found that the practice improves gender mix by increasing the number of women in the work force, expands the labor supply in an otherwise tight market, improves the disability employment gap and supports families and home life. As one LinkedIn poster put it, replying to Bloom, “Isn’t it amazing what the ability to put in a load of laundry during the workday can do for overall happiness.”

Studies of call centers in China and Turkey that measured fully remote versus on-premise employment found that remote employees had higher performance metrics, including taking fewer sick days and processing more calls.

It seems that companies are ignoring the data. Amazon, a former employer of mine, prides itself on a data-driven culture that asks employees to be “skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ.” And yet, to support its new edict that employees must return to the office five days a week by the start of the new year, the company issued a letter that had a conspicuous lack of such data. Instead, Amazon Web Services’ chief, Matt Garman, in an all-staff meeting for the division, reportedly leaned on phrases like “I feel” and “we believe.” For a company that values data so highly, the top brass sure are in their feelings.

If the C-suites are not being driven by data, what is driving them? Studies presented at Stanford University’s October 2024 Remote Work Conference analyzed over 1,200 companies with return-to-office policies, and they found that such orders were more likely to be delivered after a poor financial performance. This suggests the office mania is less about improving company operations and more about reassuring shareholders that leadership means business. Given that those orders also upset longstanding workers to the point of quitting, perhaps they’re also a cloaked way to reduce head count.

The shift from back to the office is not only ungrounded in research; it is also damaging, particularly for people with disabilities and for caregivers. During the pandemic, employment for workers with a disability rose by 22 percent. The economist and Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin noted in her 2024 Nobel lecture that creating virtual jobs that are akin to their in-office counterparts brightens the professional prospects for caregivers, especially women. Caregivers and people with disabilities shouldn’t have to settle for lower-paid or less desirable roles.

Having worked for Amazon and Starbucks, I’ve heard the frustration from former colleagues facing child-care challenges, grueling commutes and moves across the country. It seems particularly cruel to be hired into a role advertised as fully remote and then told to “return” to an office that’s not even in the same state.

This divide is evident in vacation locales such as Big Sky, Mont., and Aspen and Telluride, Colo., where the rich and remote have exacerbated a wealth gap and an affordable housing crisis and have changed the character of the country. While epic ski slopes beckon the C-suite, service workers drive from increasing distances to steam lattes and shovel snow. As these towns devolve into the patricians and the plebeians, it’s as though American society is becoming ancient Rome.

Calls for workers to return to the office while company leaders stay remote are particularly tough to swallow, given research showing that it’s the C-suite that is more ineffective from afar — not the rank and file. Ran Duchin of Boston College and Denis Sosyura of Arizona State University tracked over 900 long-distance chief executives and found that they underperform compared with their on-premise counterparts. The greater the distance between the CEO’s home and the company’s headquarters, the greater the performance gap.

And using a jet to quickly close literal distances only widens a class gap.