Parents are working with their two sons at home due to the coronavirus outbreak in Paris in 2020.
Xavier Laine | Getty Images News | Getty Images
People have changed plans to work from home since the coronavirus closed its office last year, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said during a conference call with analysts on Tuesday. At first people liked their new, scattered arrangements, but now some people are longing to be back at work, he said.
Cisco, whose network switches, phones and Wi-Fi access points are installed on corporate websites, is one of the businesses that could benefit from a widespread return to the office. The state of the pandemic remains in check, and Robbins’ words communicate the lack of certainty surrounding the aftermath and how it will affect matters.
“I think we went into that phase where people are struggling mentally, people are – they don’t enjoy it,” Robbins said.
Just as Robbins regularly talks to customers, he also communicates with Cisco’s own workers. On the call, he raised the input he had recently received to state his point.
“One of our employees told me the other day, ‘I do not care about the option to work from home. I do not like being forced to work from home,'” he said. said.
Cisco workers have other pressures to deal with. In August, after reporting three-quarters of declining revenue from business challenges, Cisco, once the most valuable company in the world, announced a cost-saving program that includes the provision of voluntary early retirement. Some Cisco employees in Australia and New Zealand have returned to their offices, while workers in North America will return at least in mid-summer, a spokesman said.
Robbins has his own idea about the role of the office outside of Cisco.
“I really believe it’s going to be hybrid where people are going to work from home and everyone is going to land here where they are going to work from home three days a week and work from the office two days a week and vice versa,” he said. said. “The question is what kind of accommodation it leads to customers based on employees’ concerns about space issues, concerns about future pandemics or other problems. That’s what we just do not know yet.”
Technical firms are increasingly promising more flexibility around remote work when the pandemic ends. On Tuesday, Salesforce announced that the majority of its employees would work on a ‘flex’ schedule with one to three days in the office per week, while Twitter and Dropbox both said employees could work permanently from home.
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