Of all the ways the world has changed in the last several years, our daily work life has perhaps seen the most significant swing.
Just a few years ago, many of us didn’t know what “work from home” even meant.
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The vast majority of us packed up our lunches, filed into a long line of traffic each morning, grabbed a to-go cup of coffee, and worked at a desk or job site all day.
So, when the world shut down in early 2020, our jobs were among the first things to transform.
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For many of us, that meant bringing our work laptops home, getting familiar with Teams or Zoom, and doing our best to do our work remotely.
Initially, plenty of CEOs hailed the benefits of remote work.
“There are some very clear benefits to remote work,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time. “It lets us access talent pools outside of traditional tech hubs in big cities — and that should help spread economic opportunity much more widely around the country and world while also helping us build a more diverse company.”
Zuckerberg added in March 2020 that initial studies of remote work indicated that people were more productive than they would ordinarily be in an office.
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Companies change their tune
But as with many things, many corporate leaders’ opinions of remote work changed as time went on.
Silicon valley, which as a whole initially hailed remote work as one of the greatest advancements of the 2020s, largely pulled back on the stance as teams became fractured and in-person brainstorming sessions became next to impossible.
“People who work from home are not efficient and engineers who come to the office get more work done,” Zuckerberg said just three years after his early remote work commentary.
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Elon Musk has called remote work “morally wrong,” and a “covid privilege,” for white collar workers, when other employees — such as those who make cars in Tesla factories — don’t have that option.
“It’s messed up to assume that they have to go to work when you don’t,” Musk said. “It’s not just a productivity thing. I think it’s morally wrong.”
Musk went on to lay off thousands of employees at Twitter, many of whom had been remote.
Walmart takes a hard stance
Now, the stance on remote work has rippled into the retail space, with Walmart (WMT) sending an internal memo to employees about new relocation plans.
The retail giant is telling employees that it will now require them to move to new hubs if they aren’t there already; workers in smaller offices, such as in Hoboken, N.J., will now be expected to move to larger hubs, like in Arkansas and Sunnyvale, Calif.
Some roles will also be eliminated entirely.
“We are making these changes to put key capabilities together, encouraging speed and shared understanding,” Walmart Chief People Officer Donna Morris wrote to employees. “Through this review process, we have eliminated some roles as we streamline how we work.”
Not many Walmart employees are remote nowadays, anyway. In 2022, the retail giant implemented a return to office policy, mandating most employees come in to one of the offices as a way to encourage collaboration. Around the same time, it constructed a 350 acre corporate campus in Bentonville, Ark. complete with 12 office buildings and other work-life balance amenities.
“Our values and culture are strategic differentiators for us as a company, and they are fostered by being together,” Morris continued. “We’ve already seen the benefits of having more teams working together in person, and today we are sharing another step that will help accelerate our momentum.”
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