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Tech giants are pushing for the return-to-the-office (RTO) as companies want employees back at their desks.
Tech giants are summoning their employees back to the office, five years after championing the benefits of remote and hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Back in 2020, Meta (then Facebook) closed global offices in a broad shift to remote work. CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly stated that up to half of Facebook’s workforce could work remotely long-term, predicting that “many employees may never return to the office full-time” and that remote work could remain for the next five to ten years.
Amazon issued similar guidance at the time. A year later, Amazon’s approach to remote work remained at least somewhat flexible. Early internal policies allowed corporate employees to work from home some days, with team leaders given discretion over schedules.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai was an early advocate of a flexible, hybrid future of work. In 2020 he said Google would adopt a “hybrid work model,” blending remote and office work and expanding flexibility to meet employees’ needs.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella publicly championed hybrid and flexible work, saying business leaders would need to redefine productivity in a world where flexibility in when, where, and how people work is critical, and that hybrid models would play a lasting role in the future of work.
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A gap emerges
Microsoft’s annual Work Trend Index was also invaluable during this period in tracking employee sentiment. In 2022, it found that employees were feeling more productive working from home, but leaders weren’t seeing things the same way.
Through necessity, this period demonstrated that remote work could function at scale for large technology companies – setting the stage for a post-pandemic debate over why tech employees now should be back in the office.
Today, more than four in five US employees enjoy some degree of remote flexibility, with 55% working in a hybrid model, 26% working exclusively remotely, and 19% working exclusively on-site, according to Gallup’s longitudinal study of over 400,000 U.S. employees between 2020 and 2025.
Now, executives argue that in-person collaboration fuels innovation, strengthens culture, and accelerates learning, while employees point to pandemic-era productivity levels and ask why they need to sit on Zoom calls in the office.
Return for collaboration
Despite CEOs’ pledges that hybrid working arrangements were here to stay, many companies have embraced in-person work with a renewed zeal.
In today’s post-pandemic landscape, hybrid and remote working are widely accepted practices, but the biggest tech companies are bucking the trend.
Meta was the first to call for a broad return to working in the office. In September 2023 it established a policy mandating at least three in-office days per week for most employees, with non-compliance potentially leading to job loss, though enforcement differs by team.
A year later, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy issued a memo to employees questioning if the company was “set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other, and to our culture, to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business.”
Then, in April 2025, Google announced that some remote employees must return to the office at least three days per week. In a statement to CBNC, Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokesperson, said: “As we’ve said before, in-person collaboration is an important part of how we innovate and solve complex problems.”
The tech giant Microsoft published a memo to staff by chief people officer Amy Coleman in September 2025, announcing that staff are required to be in the office at least three days a week, beginning with a phased rollout from February 2026.
“We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive,” Coleman wrote in the memo.
Whether employees agree with this stance or not, the tide has turned on remote and hybrid working at these large organizations.
“Time and again, in-person collaboration lets tech teams solve problems faster. Without even the obviousness of home environment distractions and internet lag, face-to-face builds trust. Interpersonal interactions are worth way more than a dozen Teams messages,” Matt Weston, senior managing director at the recruiter Robert Half told LeadDev.
“While remote work offers certain advantages, when it comes to close collaboration, idea generation and fostering innovation, in-person interaction proves more effective,” he added.
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