In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM had announced that it was obliging a significant number of its staff to give up on remote working and instead move back to corporate offices, many of them regional hubs. Although we had been aware of the change in policy since February, the issue only went viral as a result of the WSJ story. Comparisons were quickly made with Yahoo’s poorly received decision to summon staff back to its corporate HQ in 2013 and commentators expressed dismay that such a major corporation would be willing to return to the command and control structures of a previous era, especially given its sector and track record of encouraging flexible working. What such commentary missed was a particular nuance of the story that might suggest this is more of a continuation of IBM policy than they have been given credit for.
In 2008, IBM announced that it had reduced its global office footprint by 78 million square feet, three quarters of which had been sold off for a net gain of nearly $2 billion. The main driver of this divestment was the large number of people who were no longer working full time in one of the firm’s offices. At that time, the last for which we have data, 40 percent of its 400,000 employees did not work in a traditional office.
The new normal for office occupiers?
This is where the most recent decision to ask people to work in a regional centre gets interesting. IBM is ostensibly doing it to encourage people to collaborate better, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that physical proximity is an important component in the way people interact and share ideas. That is why many of the world’s tech giants invest so much in remarkable office environments even though they own the rights to technology that could make them redundant. In this context, there is some logic to IBM’s decision.