Remote work outlook: Even Zoom is returning to in-person work

“Connecting people has been really important as we’ve expanded beyond our core business into other verticals,” Zoom’s chief people officer, Matthew Saxon, explained in a recent blog post. Fortune interview. “We still work mostly remotely, but I think a lot of people forget about the many products and solutions we have that are designed for office-based work.”

Zoom has customers “that span the spectrum,” said Saxon, who joined the company from Meta in 2022. “We have customers that are fully in-office. We have customers that are fully remote, and we have all sorts of hybrid solutions in between. We want to make sure that we’re very customer-centric; that means we really have to understand the use case and the customer’s pain points.”

This becomes a challenge, especially assessing the needs of employees working entirely in the office, if Zoom’s core workforce is permanently remote.

So Saxon and his C-level colleagues told employees that if they lived within 50 miles of a Zoom office, they would have to come in two days a week, structured around the team. (Zoom’s four U.S. offices are in San Jose, Denver, Santa Barbara and Kansas City.) Within the first week of the rollout, ideas began pouring in to improve the product and increase efficiency, Saxon said.

“We’ve seen a revolution in the way we work, and I’m not just talking about Zoom,” he continued. “I’m talking about moving from surviving to thriving, and I think overall we’ve checked the box, as a society, on whether we can survive remotely. The question of whether we can thrive and what that looks like today remains unanswered.”

Then there’s Saxon himself, who works entirely remotely from Austin: “I think I can effectively manage people on Zoom while working entirely remotely,” he said. Fortune. “I go to the office from time to time, obviously, for my role, but most of the time I’m at home.”

That makes Saxon a testament to Zoom’s mission — or what many people perceived to be its mission during the pandemic, when the office was often not an option at all and work was only getting done one way.

Explain the “why” behind the mandate

These two days at the office for local workers are filled with meaningful in-person worklike trainings and general meetings, with a simple after-work drink thrown in. “But I don’t think people need it all the time,” Saxon noted. “A little bit of in-person work every now and then can really help, but again, we found that people were coming into the office to do their individual contributor work. In that case, there’s no real difference if you’re on a Zoom call.”

Certainly, these other added values, such as relationship building and networking, are undeniably valuable. But solo workers are nonetheless “certainly very effective through engagement and interaction purely via Zoom,” Saxon said.

“I think we can do things very, very effectively” without an office, Saxon said. But if, like Zoom Corporate, they decide to return to the office, it has to be deliberate and decision-makers have to show their work. “Thought is crucial,” he advised.

When the decision to return to the office was made, shortly after Saxon arrived, Zoom employees wanted to know the “why,” he recalls. So the team answered. “We had a good, honest conversation about our product, our customer base, and how we’re going to improve,” he said. “When we had a deeper discussion, we asked Zoom employees to tell us why they needed to work together.” laissez-faire “Our approach of coming in on certain days wasn’t optimized, and employees told us that. So we said, ‘Okay, let’s try this different model.’ I think it’s been a good success.”

Proximity bias can help, but it can’t always protect you

Another benefit of working alongside your boss: It can help new employees succeed, because the psychological impacts of face-to-face meetings are nearly impossible to replicate.Proximity bias “It’s a thing that exists,” Saxon acknowledged. “I think it’s our responsibility to make sure that we have a quality flow of information, so that things like asynchronous work can happen. We also need to make sure that we have some level of reporting and measurement.”

With these numbers in mind, remote workers in remote locations aren’t discriminated against when it comes to raises or promotions, or layoffs. Zoom has held several of these, including one in February which has reduced its workforce by almost 2%, according to CNBC.

In that regard, Mr. Saxon said the same rules of transparency apply. “It’s important to communicate the reasons why certain decisions have to be made. I think employees have come to expect that, and I think it’s a legitimate expectation,” he said. “They don’t always have to agree with it, but I think it’s really important to take the time to explain things. We’ve spent a lot of time on that, even when we’ve done layoffs.”

After the explaining comes the listening. “We needed to give people the means to express their feelings and be heard, that’s essential,” Saxon said. “I use the analogy that culture is like a garden. It constantly needs air, food, watering and refinement. Culture is an extremely nuanced but important thing that requires a thoughtful approach.”