foreign companies are returning people to offices. Why will this inevitably affect Russia?
Sometimes it seems like remote work has always been with us. Although IT specialists started working from home en masse only in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then they said that this was a temporary measure and that in a month everyone would return to the office.
4 years have passed, the peak of remote work is behind us – employers are starting to return people to offices. The latter, of course, resist. We'll tell you why the world's bigtech didn't like remote work, why Russian companies are trying to lure people back to their offices, and why remote work is in danger of disappearing.
Part 1: War on Amazon
The main confrontation developed right before our eyes over the course of two years. In February 2023, Amazon CEO Andy Jesse announced a new “Return To Office” policy, requiring all employees to work from the office three days a week. In response to this, two opposing forces emerged in the company: remote workers and office returnees. Each “party” created its own Slack channel and began campaigning.
The first effect of three days of working in the office is the spread of the “coffee badging” phenomenon. Employees began to come to the office for show, drink coffee and go home to work. The management quickly realized what was happening and began to track the time that employees spent in the office. For some teams, rules were established for minimum time at work – for some, two hours a day, and for others, six.
Amazon employees held no protests against returning to the office. For example, last June, more than 2,000 people showed up at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle to highlight a “lack of trust in the decisions made.” Afterwards, a petition against remote work, signed by 30,000 employees, landed on the general director’s desk—the petition was rejected.
The standoff ended this fall: Andy Jesse announced a full return to the office on January 1, 2025. Who knows, maybe it was the last straw employee history Amazon, who admitted that in a year and a half of his work he did not complete a single task, while earning $500,000.
He got a job at Amazon as a Technical Product Manager after being laid off from Google. I worked on average 8 hours a week, mostly just coming to daily meetings. All he said on calls was the word “rejected.” In a year and a half of work, I closed only 7 tickets and provided one control panel, which I assembled in 3 days using ChatGPT. And for another three months he pretended to be working on this task.
Part 2: remote work through the eyes of employers
Amazon isn't the only company trying to get workers back into the office. This is what Apple, IBM, Google, Zoom, Twitter, Rockstar Games (creators of GTA) do. 80% of American CEOs said that they want it back people to offices for five days.
The official reason is a decrease in work efficiency. For example, Dell was one of the first to popularize the idea of remote work. They planned to transfer 60% of employees to permanent remote work in order to save on office rent. But after 2 years they began to bring everyone back because labor productivity had dropped significantly. This is confirmed by research with a sample of 10,000 specialists.
More recently, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, cited remote work as the main reason Google is falling behind in AI. “Sorry to be blunt, but if you drop out of college and try to start your own company, don't let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete with other startups,” he added during a speech to Stanford students. university. True, a few days later Eric Schmidt contacted the editors of The Wall Street Journal with a refutation – they say, he didn’t mean it that way, sorry. He also asked to remove the video recording of his speech to students.
The trend to return to the office has also affected the Russian market. Thus, a study by Rostelecom showsthat every fifth company experienced a drop in labor efficiency due to remote work, this negatively affected financial results. Rabota.ru and SberPodbor conducted a large survey in 2023, which showed that 65% of companies decided refuse from remote.
This is far from the only problem. For example, some employees, working from home, began to take second and even third jobs. Such multi-machine operators are referred to as overemployed. A 2023 study by recruiting platform Monster showed that 37% of respondents had more than one full-time job remotely.
We interviewed CEOs and founders of 22 Russian digital companies to find out how remote work affected efficiency. And the main thing is whether they plan to return people to the office.
The result surprised us:
51% of respondents did not notice any changes in work efficiency while working remotely;
16% noted a slight decrease in efficiency;
9% said that employees began to work much worse;
24% of respondents are confident that working remotely has slightly increased work efficiency.
The financial performance of the companies also did not suffer – 75% of respondents are sure of this. And the remaining 23% noted that finances have only gotten better, thanks to a reduction in office space and other costs. Only 2% of respondents noticed a slight decrease in income and associated this with remote work.
It seems that remote work works much better in Russia than in the rest of the world. Employees are efficient, financial performance is only growing. But here’s what’s strange: 50% of our respondents noted that they plan to return people to offices in the near future at least for a few days a week. And another 11% are going to completely cancel remote work.
It would seem, why? Perhaps it is due to the accompanying disadvantages.
Part 3: remote work through the eyes of an employee
Remote work looks completely different through the eyes of an employee. Here result research by hh.ru and PIK – 61% of Russians felt better and more productive after switching to a remote format. Among the advantages, they noted saving money and time, independence in managing time.
Adherents of remote work cite another important argument – we are talking about the time they spend on the way to work. In big cities this takes from 30 minutes to an hour. Should this time be considered working time? After all, this is more than 8 hours of travel every week – a full-time working day that no one will pay for.
We conducted a second survey among digital specialists who work remotely for Russian companies. 170 people took part in the survey.
41% of respondents are confident that they have become much more efficient;
32% did not notice a difference;
14% noted that efficiency has increased, but only slightly;
8% noticed a slight decrease in work efficiency;
2% of respondents believe that working remotely has become much worse;
3% of respondents were unable to answer the question.
And here are a few answers from respondents that we simply could not help but share (spelling and punctuation preserved):
Don't communicate directly with morons. Don't sit in tight jeans. It is not necessary to be “friends” with colleagues.
No worries, I can lie in the park with my laptop, the dog is glad that I don’t disappear anywhere.
You can skip work if there is nothing urgent. All communication is in correspondence – there is time to put out your ass and respond normally. Easy access to tea/cookies.
Don't ride the damn train for an hour and a half every day. Homemade cutlets.
But there are also disadvantages. Here's what respondents noted:
90% named the main problem as lack of communication with colleagues;
Awareness of company affairs and corporate news decreases;
Overtime occurs more often than in the office;
The boundaries of work-home/work-leisure are blurring;
Resolution of work issues is delayed;
Communication problems, increased number of unnecessary calls;
It’s more difficult to concentrate; household chores distract you.
And also incredible hardships about which it is impossible to remain silent (spelling and punctuation preserved):
Vitamin D deficiency, in theory, can cause hemorrhoids, but I have not encountered this problem yet.
Running to the refrigerator. It's hard to control yourself. Alone. Cockroaches in the apartment
The main question is what will respondents do if their current employer prohibits remote work and requires constant presence in the office?
Well, we at hitch are already preparing a new study – this time an analysis of changes in salary expectations in IT for 2024. Yes, we've been collecting data on popular stacks and positions all year! We publish the results of the study, as well as important news about technology and digital business. in our telegram channel. You can also find a free bot there that will tell you what salary to ask for at an interview.
Part 4: So it's war?
It seems that supporters and opponents of remote work are irreconcilable. American employers in an attempt to identify office work evaders started to implement attendance tracking systems.
Here are the most popular:
• By connection to Wi-Fi (51%)
• From access cards to enter the office (47%)
• Neural networks (44%)
• View by camera (35%)
• People counting sensors and presence sensors (24%)
• Under-table sensors (16%).
They are also trying to control remote employees. Eleven respondents to our survey noted that after switching to remote work, management required them to install additional software to monitor work.
Companies developing services for monitoring employees have increased the number of clients. For example, interest in the tracking app DeskTime in April 2023 increased by 333% compared to last year.
Home monitoring methods are varied. Typically this involves tracking via a webcam, using keystroke tracking programs, or the activity of employee accounts on social networks. Sneek, a service that takes pictures from employee webcams every 5 minutes, has seen its subscriber base increase tenfold during the pandemic.
Remote workers, in turn, refuse to leave the comforts of their homes and weave conspiracy theories about who benefits from bringing people back to the office. For example, developers who rent out offices – they tolerate multi-million dollar losses due to the fact that tenants simply refuse to continue paying for empty offices.
Part 5: the fate of remote work in Russia
We went to HR Director of hitch, Andrey Chakchkrin, with this question:
“We conduct about a thousand interviews a year and close hundreds of applications for IT specialists. Over the past six months, I have noticed a significant increase in the number of vacancies with a hybrid work format. Until the spring of 2024, these were single applications, but now large companies have made office visits 2-3 times a year a week is a prerequisite, and the cities of presence are always Moscow, St. Petersburg and several other large regional centers.
It seems to me that in the next five years, corporations will definitely tighten the screws on remote control. But small companies and startups will make remote work one of the main competitive advantages in the struggle for personnel.
We ourselves didn’t notice how we raised a generation of middles who couldn’t see the world without remote work. Many people started their careers during the pandemic and simply don’t know what daily office work is like. How we will lure them into offices is a big question. This could develop into a serious problem for the industry—before our eyes, specialists are growing, including team leads, who have not acquired offline communication skills.”
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