I started my career in the corporate world and soon realised that I was extremely bad at corporate-ing. My main problem was that I liked to leave the office and have a life which was obviously a big no-no for anyone hoping for career progression.
At one point a superior had to sit me down and tell me sternly that I should never be seen leaving before 8pm at the earliest, even if I had nothing to do. So, in a misguided attempt at climbing the greasy pole, I started printing Wilkie Collins novels, sticking them in an official looking binder, and poring over them with a highlighter, so it looked like I was doing important business things. No need to tell you that I didn’t last very long at that job.
Anyway, that was the working world back then, wasn’t it? Face time was everything, commutes were long and people basically lived in the office. Then the pandemic came along and a more flexible and family-friendly way of work took hold. Remote and hybrid work became the new normal. Or so we thought.
It seems like that era has officially come to an end. The death knell? Zoom, the company that helped to usher in the age of remote work and which arguably benefited from the transition to remote work more than any other business, has now summoned its workers back to the office. To be fair, it has only asked staff living a “commutable distance” to travel in at least two days a week but the announcement still feels symbolic.
Zoom isn’t alone in beckoning its employees back to HQ. Pretty much every big employer has moved on from remote-only policies initiated in 2020. Funnily enough, the tech companies that keep telling us the future is virtual seem to be leading the charge when it comes to in-person work. Meta, which once evangelised about how “good work can get done everywhere” recently told employees to return to the office three days a week starting in September. Google has done the same, and in an attempt to sweeten the deal it offered employees a “summer special” where they can stay at an on-campus hotel for $99 (£78) a night to help them “transition to the hybrid workplace”. That is generous, but not as generous as Twitter (sorry, “X”) – where you can sleep in the office to prove your devotion and reportedly get fired anyway.
Earlier this year, Amazon also announced that it required employees to come into the office at least three days a week. This didn’t go down well with many workers, who had become accustomed to luxuries such as seeing their children for more than 30 minutes a day. Still, despite the pushback, Amazon’s leadership remains resolute. Mike Hopkins, senior vice-president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, recently said in an internal meeting that it was time for workers to “disagree and commit” to coming back to the office. “We’re here, we’re back – it’s working,” he reportedly proclaimed. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.” Who needs data, eh, when you’ve got the gut instinct of a senior vice president?
I often think of a beautiful essay which the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote for the Financial Times in 2020. “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” she wrote. “This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice … Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
In the first year of the pandemic, I thought that this collective traumatic experience, which claimed so many lives, might change the way we live. I thought – how naive! – that there might be a widespread reassessment of what was important, and we might all fight for change. I thought the pandemic might be a portal to a better society.
It wasn’t. We clapped for essential workers, then abandoned them. The poor got poorer; the rich got richer. House prices shot up; shelter became even more unaffordable. Remote work seemed to be the only positive change that might stick, and now it has gone. Three years on, it is very clear which path we chose.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
