As the post-Covid tussle between tech firms and their workers plays out over returning to the office, Frederic Meyer is one of those to have left his job yet he still believes he is among the lucky ones.
The 49-year-old from France spent 14 years working for a US multinational after moving to Ireland with his wife Dympna, but was already questioning his work-life balance when the pandemic struck. Like millions of others, he realised there was a very different way of working.
Meyer was a manager and embraced working from home, not least because of the additional time it allowed him to spend with their two kids. He subsequently advocated for team members who wanted to take advantage of the new regime by moving away from Dublin.
He was taken with all the talk of a new working world and believed the changes suddenly forced upon employers might give rise to a long-term shift in culture.
Pretty soon, though, he came to realise that many of those who had risen to the top of firms while working the traditional way didn’t see any reason for the rules of the game to change.
“You could see there were executives on video calls and they looked absolutely miserable because their lives had been completely upended,” he says.
Meyer acknowledges that he had gone along with the US multinational culture happily for quite a few years, and Dympna was originally in the sector too. Both worked long hours and hard but were well rewarded for it.
“But nothing is for free in the professional world and things change when kids come into the equation,” he said.
“You don’t see your kids… You put them in creches, from 7.30 to 6.30 or whatever the maximum time is. You have an au pair raising them for you. We had the money for all of this but looking back, it was insane really.”
In the end, Dympna decided to change careers and retrained as a special-needs assistant while Meyer started looking at family-friendly options were available to him.
It helped, he says, that his own manager was Irish and she supported his initial decision to take parental leave in the form of having Fridays off.
Then the pandemic struck, Dympna contracted long Covid and the work-life balance shifted quite a bit.
Working at home cut out the commute and allowed Frederic to contribute more on the family front but when the word came the company would be starting to return to the office, he knew it would no longer work.
“I said I wanted to take a sabbatical. It was also in the policies but nobody my level had ever done it before.
“I think the impression they had when I was working the four-day week was that I wasn’t interested in promotion – but now I was nuking my career.
“I was always treated well, with complete respect, but companies sign up to these policies not expecting anyone to actually use them. HR didn’t like me talking to colleagues about my sabbatical because they didn’t want 50 other people to apply, which I can understand, but either you can do these things or you can’t.”
Meyer took his year and by the time it was ending his line manager had moved on. His new one was based in the US. “I told him: ‘Here’s the deal, I want to come back but I can only work Irish school hours.’
“To be fair to my boss, he fought for it, brought up at a higher level but in the end it was refused because they didn’t want set an example. They couldn’t really entertain a guy in Ireland working on times where colleagues in California couldn’t talk to him because they wouldn’t be up when school here finished.
“And the return to work was proving to be a bit of a nightmare, they were realising there were tax implications about all the people who moved all over the world. So, I think when they saw my request, they just thought: ‘Are you kidding me? We have enough problems right now.’”
Meyer’s circumstances are scarcely unique in the current tech sector, although the decisions involved are more commonly taken by women.
Laura Bambrick, head of social policy at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, points to CSO figures published in November suggesting that while 81,000 more people were doing some portion of their work from home in the third quarter of 2024 compared with 12 months earlier, some 68,000 of them were women.
When it came to working entirely away from the office, there was overall decline of more than 10,000 in the year but the number of women actually increased by more than 17,000.
She suggests the numbers contradict the general perception that remote and hybrid working from home’s moment has passed and contends that moves by some big firms, such as Amazon, which announced it would bring thousands of staff back to the office five days a week from the start of 2025, are partially aimed at shedding jobs by prompting resignations, something the firm has denied.
Trayc Keevans, global foreign direct investment director at recruitment firm Morgan McKinley, says significant numbers of people are still deciding to leave roles rather than comply with the more restrictive shifts in policy.
“We’ve seen a lot of people walk away from very good [pay] packages to go to competitors where maybe they’re equalling most of the package, but not all of it,” she says. “That flexibility the other employer is offering them is enough for them to offset the financial loss.”
Meyer left in the end and though he picked up a consulting job for a year, that has ended and he is currently weighing his options, with starting his own business a possibility. Dympna is recovered and back at work and he considers himself “so lucky” to be financially secure enough to have the option of taking more time out to spend with their children.
He acknowledges it is up to companies paying so well to decide how they want to work, but does wish there was a little more substance to the talk of flexibility.
“Covid proved what could be done. No businesses crumbled, right? By some miracle, they kept on moving forward, some more than usual, there was no productivity crush.
“But then, as soon as it was possible, everybody was brought back for reasons that you can still totally argue about. There is no concrete data backing up the CEOs who are so crazy to have everyone in the office. It would be great if it had meant there were more options and different ways of working now, but it’s not a model they are interested in.”
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