IBM orders employees back for a three-day week in the office

Software giant mandates a return to the office for employees living within 50 miles of an office

IBM has become the latest big name tech company to mandate at least a partial return to offices.

As initially reported in The Register an internal blog post told employees of the software division that if they lived within a 50 mile radius of an office, they should be present in that office at least three days a week.

Kareem Yusuf, senior vice president of for product management and growth, and Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice president for products at IBM Software said in a joint post:

"Right now, 1 in 4 of you are working in the office three days a week. By October, we want to see that number closer to 3 in 4."

The days on which employees are expected to be in the office remain at the discretion of local management.

In line with other tech giants, IBM indicates that greater office utilisation is necessary for the levels of connection and collaboration necessary to boost productivity and innovation.

"It is vital to our culture and our shared goals—tripling development output, building winning products, and winning new clients—that we spend more meaningful time together, in-person," said Yusuf and Nirmal.

The pair continued to emphasise that if the company wants to maintain the flexibility of working both remote and in the office then employees "must be better stewards of getting into the office."

Backdrop of redundancies

IBM employees may find themselves incentivised to go the extra mile to get into the office by the prospect of job cuts. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said earlier this year that he planned to automate back-office functions to a much greater extent and has stopped hiring for those roles. He also warned those who liked working from home that they were more likely to be passed over for promotions.

IBM announced that it would be cutting about 1.5 percent of its global workforce, nearly 4,000 people in January.

IBM is far from an outlier in the tech community. It was reported last month that Meta will begin using data gathered from employees passes and that persistent breaches would lead to disciplinary action - all part of the "year of efficiency." Google is also using badge data to encourage people to return to its colourful campuses, much to the annoyance of many of its employees.

Salesforce and most recently Zoom have also "asked" employees to spend more time in offices.

Whilst these announcements are typically focused on the need for collaboration and innovation, some like Salesforce are more centered on the need to boost productivity. Companies like Zoom and Google have sunk millions of dollars into swish offices and campuses. Property costs are considerably harder to justify to shareholders if those properties are half empty.