Facepalm: If there's one company that you'd expect to continue its work-from-home policy, it's Zoom. Yet the communication tech giant called employees back into the office earlier this month. Now, leaked audio from CEO Eric Yuan has revealed his thinking behind the decision: he believes working via video calls stifles innovation and doesn't allow people to build as much trust.
Zoom became synonymous with working from home during the lockdowns when the software allowed much of the world to stay indoors and continue their jobs.
While many companies have ended or limited remote work, it was especially surprising when Zoom did it, given the nature of its famed product. Yuan mandated that employees living within 50 miles of one of its offices will have to start coming in at least two days per week.
Leaked audio from an August 3 all-hands meeting shared with Insider revealed why Yuan made the controversial decision. He said that "remote work didn't allow people to build as much trust or be as innovative."
"In our early days, we all knew each other," Yuan said. "Over the past several years, we've hired so many new 'Zoomies' that it's really hard to build trust."
"Trust is a foundation for everything. Without trust, we will be slow."
Yuan claimed it was hard to come up with great ideas on Zoom, adding that employees cannot have a great conversation. He also said people cannot debate because they tend to be very friendly when joining a Zoom call. He obviously never saw some of the profanity-and-anger-filled clips that circulated during the pandemic.
Yuan's explanation seems to contradict Zoom's product page boasts of the video-calling software offering "immersive in-office collaboration right from home." Collaboration is mentioned three times on the page.
Elsewhere, the section of the company's website about Zoom's Meetings feature boasts that 95% of customers report a greater sense of trust and an increase in performance. Seems nobody told Yuan.
Following a furor over the policy, Zoom was also forced to update its Terms of Service this month to state it will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train its artificial intelligence models without consent.
A recent survey found that 8 out of 10 executives regret implementing their return-to-office plans and would have done things differently if they'd had better access to workplace data.