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General Motors executives are offering a mea culpa after an email to employees on Friday afternoon detailing a back-to-office plan was met with strong opposition.
In the email at the end of the week, senior management of the US automaker said company employees should return to physical office locations at least three days a week starting in the new year.
The company described the policy as a continuation of its current work-from-home policy, which in April 2020 simply reads: “work appropriate.’
On Tuesday, a second message landed in employees’ inboxes, including a rollback of the timing initially outlined in Friday’s message.
The email added that the company will not require employees to show up in the office on specific days, but that the decision will be up to individual teams.
“Our plan has always been, and still is, to co-design the solution that best balances the needs of the business with the needs of each of you,” reads the email in business-spoken language, signed by under more GM CEO Mary Barra.
The message clarified that no employees will have to return to their offices before 2023.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra was one of the executives who signed both Friday’s message and Tuesday’s follow-up detailing some aspects of the company’s eventual plan to allow white-collar workers to return to the office.
General Motors’ downtown Detroit Renaissance Center offices have remained largely empty since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020
“While we have maintained a highly collaborative culture in a very challenging time over the past two years, the intangible benefits of personal collaboration will become a critical success factor as we enter a period of rapid launches,” read the memo, according to CNBC.
“This evolution is about being ready for the next phase of our transformation,” it continued.
Friday’s initial message was immediately upset by some salaried members of the GM staff.
An anonymous employee told the Detroit Free Press‘You can imagine the general mood.
“The company has been talking quite a bit about Work Appropriately ever since this all started, and we were all completely blown away by this news,” the employee said.
According to a company spokesperson, the overall plan to bring employees back to the office has “not really changed,” but the follow-up note aims to “provide more clarity to address some of the questions and concerns we have.” have received.’
The company apologized for the timing of the Friday afternoon message and its vagueness. According to top executives, the email went out to mitigate the impact of a communication that reached several departments prematurely.
“We want to take the opportunity to address some of the questions, concerns and misconceptions we’ve heard. We recognize that the timing of the message, late on a Friday afternoon, was unfortunate. It was also unintentional.
“We chose to communicate company-wide before we had the opportunity to work more broadly on the implementation plan. We believe the benefits of transparency — even with sub-optimal timing and partial detail — outweigh the risk of creating mistrust by letting you hear the information second-hand,” the statement read.
More information will arrive in late October, the company said, adding it will “continue to listen to your feedback in the coming weeks so we can incorporate it into our implementation plans.”
GM salaries who have become accustomed to remote work were immediately put off by the idea of returning, even part of the time, to the office. Some said they were surprised after the company pushed through its Work Appropriately philosophy during the pandemic, allowing most employees to work largely from home
The US automaker reportedly hired 7,000 employees in 2022 before taking a hiring break in May, many of whom are remote workers who don’t necessarily live in Michigan.
The GM Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit has reportedly been so empty in recent years that some have wondered what would happen to the company’s massive ghost town if workers never returned.
Management’s Friday note discussed some of the reasons the company plans to move away from remote working.
“Over time, we have lost some of the important, intangible benefits of regular face-to-face collaboration, including informal mentoring, more efficient communication and adding a corporate mindset to our work. We are entering a rapid launch cycle that will, quite frankly, define our future trajectory, and we need to make quick change – individually and collectively – so that we can achieve our goals,” it said.
In the post, Barra noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has improved significantly and a safe return to the office is now entirely possible.
Employees were taken aback by the sudden announcement of a switch, largely because of how GM positioned Work Appropriately as the company’s new cultural philosophy for the post-pandemic era.
Leaders at the industry giant sold the philosophy as a way to recruit top talent without having to relocate candidates to Michigan, where the company is headquartered.
In 2021, GM hired some 10,000 people around the world, and 7,000 in 2022 – many of them remotely.
In May, GM announced it would not hire more people this year.