Zoom’s announcement has work-from-home haters rubbing their hands with glee

Zoom, the video conferencing company, has ordered staff back to the office. The move feels beyond “pot calling the kettle black” levels of hypocrisy to the heights of “the pot giving the kettle a final written HR warning for wearing black”.

Thanks to the pandemic, the company’s name became both a verb and noun that meant generally doing something we did not want to do.

“Let’s hop on Zoom for a meeting,” meant 40 minutes of looking at your manager as they talked about why sales targets needed to be the “highest priority” with pretend interest while sheltering in our homes from a virus that killed millions of people.

“Join us for drinks tonight, we’re all Zooming in,” meant staring at your friends in little boxes on a laptop, awkward pauses then gabbled snatches of conversation as they talked over each other. Thankfully, Zoom drinks and, even worse, family Zoom quiz nights were abandoned in subsequent lockdowns. Most of us realised these ersatz social interactions just made us feel more isolated and alone after we closed our screens down and realised we were still drinking alone in our livingrooms. Being alone and free to behave as weird as you like is sometimes more gratifying than pretending to have forced-fun with others.

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Maybe it’s a tiny bit of collective schadenfreude that headlines gleefully announced Zoom now requires employees that live within at least 80km of an office to come in at least a few days a week. After all, this was the company who let the tyranny of video calls ruin working from home for the rest of us. Sure, there were other applications but they were slow and annoying. Management would have given up after a while. We would have had telephone conferences where we were free to roll our eyes in peace whenever the office dose said a whole lot of nothing using words like “move the needle”; “low-hanging fruit”; or “circle back”.

We would have been free to wear what we wanted. We wouldn’t have had to hastily kick all the mess out of view in our tiny box rooms for the morning standup. We wouldn’t have nosy co-workers commenting on our backgrounds. No more “it looks very sunny where you are there Sandra, are you sure you’re still in Mullingar?” even when it was just a spell of sunshine in August.

We will only drive ourselves mad dreaming of what could have been without those meddlers at Zoom. They have their own struggles. While the pandemic and the rise of remote working had share prices soaring around the $500 (€455.13) mark in late 2020, it is now back middling around the pre-pandemic levels of $67 .

Like many tech companies that scaled up dramatically in the pandemic, Zoom announced lay-offs in 2023. Chief executive, Eric Yuan, wrote in a memo that he expected 15 per cent of staff – roughly 1,300 people – to be let go.

Now, remaining staff have been asked back into the office under a “structured hybrid approach”, according to a company spokesperson.

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Work from home haters are rubbing their hands with glee. “See, even Zoom can’t do remote working,” they crow. Remote working has been blamed for ruining mental health, collapsing local businesses in cities and curtailing promotional opportunities. There has been a concerted effort from people who own empty office buildings, people who don’t actually do any work but are good at looking like they do when they have an audience and others for whom success is dependent on people sitting on little desks next to each other to get people back to the office.

Sadly, for them at least, this does not herald the end of remote working completely. Research from Stanford University released last month indicated that 29 per cent of workers in the United States work at least two to three days remotely in a hybrid model. Of the nearly 60 per cent who attended on site full-time, most were in jobs that could not be done remotely in the first place.

Ireland, in particular, seems particularly enthralled with the idea of popping in a few days a week while having the flexibility to work from home. According to research released by a commercial property group, this country jumped on hybrid working with much faster transition rates compared to other European nations. In 2022, one quarter of us were working from home “most of the time”.

We also have the second highest rate of job ads promising “remote working” in their descriptors in Europe, according to research from LinkedIn. More than 40 per cent of listings on the site in Ireland offered hybrid working.

So, despite the actions of Zoom, it looks like at least partial remote working is here to stay. Which is good news for those of us who go completely mad working and living within the same four walls. And those who, for mental health reasons, benefit from the ability to silently flip their manager off in a “cameras-off” meeting.

Just make sure you check your Zoom settings first.