Uber (UBER) CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is pointing his finger towards a negative effect of remote work. The CEO claimed during a recent earnings call that the trend has caused the company to lose some of its most loyal customers.
“With the pandemic, I think a lot of people who are kind of commuting to work, etc., stopped commuting,” said Khosrowshahi during the call. “We have lost some of our most frequent customers.”
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Though, Khosrowshahi also claimed during the call that the company is starting to see recovery as more people are making their return to the office. Uber is seeing an average of 28 million trips per day, a 21% increase compared to the same time period last year, according to the company’s first-quarter earnings report for 2024.
The company also reported that its mobility gross bookings grew by 25% year-over-year, earning $18.7 billion, but declined by 3% over the last quarter. Khosrowshahi said that Uber is overall welcoming to the return-to-office trend.
“Some folks may not like that, but we love it here at Uber, people getting back to work and getting back to the office,” said Khosrowshahi during the call.
During the full year of 2020, Uber lost 14% of its revenue as it saw a 27% decline in the amount of trips people were taking through its app.
The push for employees to return to the office has been implemented by many companies, who are eager to make a full recovery from the Covid pandemic, and it has become a point of contention for some employees.
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According to a recent survey by staffing software company Ringover, about 68% of U.S. employees that were polled claimed that their employer has recently pushed an RTO policy that is “mandatory or heavily encouraged by management.”
It also found that commuting to the office is a major challenge for workers as some argue that longer commutes can hinder work-life balance. Commuting is also expensive as the average worker in the U.S. spends about $8,466 annually on commuting to work, according to data from Clever Real Estate.
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Ringover also found that roughly 83% of employees in the survey said that they would be more encouraged to return to the office if their company paid for their commute.
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