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First came the return-to-office policies. Now comes the discipline: How companie...

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First came the return-to-office policies. Now comes the discipline: How companies are punishing work-from-home holdouts

Simon Willis
Wed, April 5, 2023, 7:00 PM GMT+9·10 min read

Earlier this year, Kelly decided to leave New York City to care for a sick relative. She figured she could move away while continuing to work remotely as a software engineer for Bloomberg, just as she’d done for the previous two years. But Kelly’s decision introduced her to the sharp end of office life in 2023, as companies try to persuade their employees to come back to the office. Her plans to move clashed with Bloomberg’s return-to-the-office directive. In the end, Kelly, who asked to go by a pseudonym because of her company’s confidentiality policy, lost her job.

Bloomberg had been trying to get staff to come into work since last November. At first, Kelly says, the return to the office (RTO) was communicated informally by managers and human resources staff, and through group emails extolling the virtues of face-to-face collaboration. The policy was not strictly enforced. At that time Kelly was still living in New York, and like everybody on her team she continued to work from home. Some colleagues had even moved to other parts of the U.S. “This had never been called out at all,” Kelly says. Her most recent performance review was “glowing,” and last year she received a healthy bonus. Even though she wasn’t showing up to the office, Bloomberg seemed perfectly happy.

In February, the company started applying more pressure. Employees were expected to use an internal system to record their location each day. Those who failed to work at their assigned office for the requisite three days a week—Bloomberg’s Manhattan headquarters, in Kelly’s case—started getting verbal reminders from their managers. When Kelly informed the company that she was planning to move—far enough away that coming to the office three days a week would be impossible—she was warned that doing so might be “difficult.” (Bloomberg declined to comment in response to detailed questions for this story.)

Kelly pushed back. “I was very frank with my manager,” she says. “I explained the situation—that it wasn’t just a personal preference but a necessity.” Her manager was sympathetic, and Kelly figured the company would see her side. After all, there was still a process in place that enabled employees to request remote work as an exception. According to Kelly, the company had never said explicitly that office time was mandatory, nor indicated what the consequences would be if people didn’t comply. Then there was that performance review: she had consistently exceeded the company’s expectations.

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