Cisco is allowing its 75,000 employees to permanently work from home
Workers get to choose if they wish full-time remote work, part-time or fully return to the office.
Even after the pandemic, the company shared the past week its new hybrid “no return to office” policy that allows employees to decide where and how they want to work.
Cisco’s approach contrasts with some tech giants who have pushed for a return to offices following the rollout of vaccines across the US. Amazon has said it intends to “return to an office-centric culture” for everyone who is not being shot into space at least. Google has signalled it will expect workers to return to offices at least one day per week starting in October.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Cisco was one of the few companies that already had people working from home. 14% of the staff were remote workers. Last year, where offices had to close forcibly, that number reached 75% of employees working from home.
When most employees began working remotely amid COVID-19 outbreaks and mandated shutdowns. However, Cisco managers found that productivity didn’t seem to take a hit from remote work, in fact it looks like they were more productive when they didn’t have to commute or listen to managers witter on about moving cheese, kicking the ball running or paradigms.
Jeetu Patel, an executive vice president who manages Cisco’s security and collaboration business said: “Anecdotally, I would say we’ve seen a very high degree of productivity. As the productivity has gone up, the thing we have do as a society is to be careful of is fatigue and burnout.”
After internal surveys and managers studying the company’s productivity and outcomes during 2020-2021, they found out that productivity was not affected by working remotely.
Other factors that led the company to choose a hybrid model were saving money and hiring better talent. The main concerns are when it translates to cybersecurity and collaboration. However, Cisco has about $6 billion destined for the research and development of the company. They will be investing in technologies that support the new hybrid work model.
The company expects that 77% of employees will work in the office three days a week and the other days they’ll be working remotely.
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