Dell Is Just The Latest Remote Work Battleground

The return to office war has entered a new phase. At first, as the effects of the pandemic waned, management tried the carrot, offering perks from parties to lunches to get workers out of the home office and back at headquarters.

Now, they’ve turned to the stick.

In recent months, layoffs have disproportionately affected remote workers as companies seek to get people to show up in person. (I’ve written before about why this is a terrible approach.) Dell—the PC and laptop giant—is putting extreme pressure on fully remote staff, putting their careers on hold by telling them they will be ineligible for promotion if they continue to work exclusively from home.

Of course, context is everything. As Business Insider noted, Dell had a hybrid policy in place long before the pandemic, and that will continue to be the case. However, management has clearly decided that they want to roll back the clock to being fully hybrid, rather than having employees permanently remote. Yet, they may struggle to thread the needle between disincentivizing remote work and alienating key team members.

This is an abrupt change of direction for CEO Michael Dell, who back in 2021 said,“If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you’re doing it wrong.”

Just two years ago, the company said it was aiming for 60% of its workforce to be remote.

Beyond Dell, new research indicates that fully remote workers may sacrifice as much at 30% in earnings, compared to their in-person counterparts.

So, what changed, not just at Dell but at companies pushing RTO across the board?

For one thing, as the risks of COVID have gone down thanks to the adoption of annual vaccines, the risks of bringing your workforce into the office have gone down. For another, executives tend to value facetime, as any ambitious striver understands. And lastly, the inherent tension between productivity (which is often higher when workers are remote) and the benefits of proximity and spontaneous interaction, which being in-person fosters, have not gone away.

Some Dell employees also believe that the change is a deliberate attempt to reduce headcount, by encouraging remote workers to quit, rather than resorting to layoffs.

And yet, if companies are too heavy handed with RTO, they will likely force out valuable team members and harm themselves in the long run. As I’ve noted before, blanket policies around things like layoffs or promotions are easier for management to implement but fail to take into account the specific strengths and circumstances of employees.

Is it worth losing a superstar player—or even team leader—because you refused to consider them for a promotion due to their remote work? Why would you layoff reliable, productive workers just because they’re remote?

Consider the benefits of remote and hybrid work. Companies save money on offices, employees are often happier without long commutes, and these policies help retain employees.

While in some cases it may truly be important that people be in the office three days per week, or even every day, that’s not always the case.

The energy of a trading floor helps breed success on Wall Street. There’s a good argument for that being in-person. Manufacturing can’t happen remotely. And yet many other types of work—from coding to customer support—can happen successfully in a remote context. It’s on leaders to learn how to build an effective remote culture and lead those teams.

Putting people at desks in the same room doesn’t instantly create an effective corporate culture. On the contrary, programmed, deliberate monthly or quarterly gatherings can be incredibly effective at galvanizing a team. Getting to know employees at random in the office is fine, but managers may develop deeper, more fruitful connections if they take time and make the effort to deliberately connect with remote workers.

The return to office debate is complicated, and every company is different. Some people were hired during the pandemic on the expectation they would be remote. Other companies failed to ever articulate a clear policy. And others are truly out of step with how business is actually done today. In the worst cases, companies’ knee-jerk attempt to force employees back fails repeatedly because they don’t hold people accountable, leading to those who actually show up feeling betrayed. No one is happy in these scenarios.

Scattershot approaches rarely work. Neither do blanket policies. As with remote worker layoffs, Dell’s new policy of denying promotions to remote workers is a blunt instrument. Given that the company had a successful remote and hybrid policy for many years—rather than being forced into it by the pandemic—the sudden push for RTO is confusing. It risks alienating workers without providing obvious benefits. Whether Dell suffers—either by losing key talent or struggling to hire in the future—remains to be seen.

Management may have the upper hand right now, but workers can always vote with their feet.