The company said that it thought a “structured hybrid approach” was the best way to work and that people who lived within 50 miles (80 km) of an office should come in at least twice a week.
It is the latest attempt by a big company to roll back rules that allow people to work from home.
Amazon and Disney are two companies that have cut back on the number of online work days.
Surveys show that some workers still want to be able to do some of their work from home.
In the US, where Zoom is based, about 12% of workers were fully remote in July, and another 29% had a mix of remote and in-office work. This is according to a monthly poll done by researchers at Stanford University and other places since the pandemic.
The Office for National Statistics in the UK noticed similar trends earlier this year.
Researchers from Stanford have already found that working from home is more popular in English-speaking countries than in Asia and Europe.
Why hybrid return-to-office rules aren’t as flexible as they seem Zoom has laid off 15% of its staff as part of a “reset” after the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, only about 5% of days in the US were spent working from home. Workers everywhere want more flexible work plans than what employers think is best.
Zoom once said that employees could work from home for as long as they wanted.
The tech company said that the new strategy would be put into place in August and September, but at different times in each country.
It said that it would continue to “hire the best people, no matter where they live.” At the end of January, more than half of the company’s 8,400 employees were based in the US.
Zoom has about 200 employees in the UK, where it just opened a new office in London.
Business Insider was the first to report on the new policy, which Zoom said would make the company “better able to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers.”
Zoom said, “We’ll keep using the whole Zoom platform to keep our employees and teams spread out connected and working well.”
In September 2022, the Wall Street Journal said that only about 1% of the company’s workers had “regular office presences,” while 75% worked from home and the rest had a mix of both.
But Zoom is facing more and more competition as companies like Microsoft improve their video services in response to the rise of online work.
Since the outbreak, growth has slowed down a lot. It said earlier this year that it would lay off 15% of its employees and that its top leaders would have to take big pay cuts.
Its shares are worth about $68 each now, but in October 2020, they were worth more than $500 each.
