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- Eric Schmidt partly credits his time in the office for his promotions.
- Schmidt said in-person work offers experiences crucial for career advancement.
- Major tech companies have cracked down on fully remote work, including Amazon, Google, and Meta.
Want a promotion? Get into the office and soak up the knowledge within its walls, Google's former CEO says.
While some companies have faced resistance after requiring staff to return to the office, Eric Schmidt said asking workers to come back is partly for "their own benefit."
Schmidt, who ran Google from 2001 to 2011 as CEO, said in a recent episode of "The Diary of A CEO" podcast that he has a "strong view" that staff should work in person to gain the types of experiences that remote work can't offer.
"When I was a young executive, I knew nothing of what I was doing," Schmidt said. "I literally was just lucky to be there, and I learned by hanging out at the water cooler, going to meetings, hanging out, being in the hallway."
The knowledge acquired from being in office was "central" to his later promotions, Schmidt said.
"If you're in your 20s, you want to be in an office because that's how you're going to get promoted," he said.
Live Data Technologies conducted an analysis of 2 million white-collar workers and found that, over the previous year, the fully remote workers were promoted 31% less often than their hybrid or fully in-office peers, The Wall Street Journal reported in January.
Schmidt said he wanted to "acknowledge" that, in some industries that have been studied, the flexibility of working from home can increase productivity. Many people who want to be remote have legitimate commuting or family concerns, and there is data indicating that productivity is "slightly higher" when remote work is allowed, he added.
"At least for the industries that have been studied, there's evidence that allowing that flexibility from work from home increases productivity," he said. "I don't happen to like it, but I want to acknowledge the science is there."
Researchers have studied the hot-button topic with conflicting results. A 2023 Goldman Sachs report that examined multiple studies suggested the varying conclusions could be due to differences in study design and how researchers measure productivity.
Studies have also suggested that being fully remote decreases workers' productivity. A 2023 study published by Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) indicated that fully remote work led to a 10% decrease in productivity compared to fully in-person work, though hybrid work appeared to have "no impact on productivity."
Although many execs praised the flexibility of hybrid schedules during the pandemic, several have backpedaled in the years since. Companies, including Amazon, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs, have ditched their remote work policies for full return-to-office mandates, with some even threatening to track performance or terminate those who don't comply.
Others have moved to a hybrid model. Mark Zuckerberg said in 2023 that performance data from Meta showed that "people who work from home are not efficient, and engineers who come to the office get more work done." Meta now requires employees to work at least three days a week from the office.
Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune Magazine one of the tech industry's "worst mistakes" was to allow employees to go "full remote forever."
Schmidt expressed similar sentiments in an April lecture at Stanford University, saying that Google is losing out to AI rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic because of its remote work policies.
"Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning," Schmidt said at the time. "And the reason the startups work is because the people work like hell." He said that if a tech giant wants to remain competitive against other startups, "you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week."
After video of the lecture was published online in August, Schmidt walked back the remarks, with his spokesperson telling Business Insider that "Eric misspoke about Google and their work hours and regrets his error."
Google told staff in 2022 that they were to return to the office for at least three days a week, later doubling down on RTO expectations the following year in an email to employees that said attendance would factor into their performance reviews. However, Google assured workers in October that it would not follow Amazon's expectations for staff to come into the office five days a week.