Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”

Big tech companies are still trying to rally workers back into physical offices, and many workers are still not having it. Based on a recent report, computer-maker Dell has stumbled even more than most.

Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.

Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell's plan to restore its in-office culture.

The publication spoke with a dozen Dell employees to hear their stories as to why they chose to stay remote, and a variety of reasons came up. Some said they enjoyed more free time and less strain on their finances after going remote, and nothing could convince them to give that up now. Others said their local offices had closed since the pandemic or that they weren't interested in promotions.

Others still noted that it seemed pointless to go in to an in-person office when the teams they worked on were already distributed across multiple offices around the world, so they'd mostly still be on Zoom calls anyway.

One person said they'd spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices.

Many interviewed admitted they were looking for work at other companies that aren't trying to corral employees back into the office.

Dell is not the only company struggling with this. For example, we've reported several times on Apple's internal struggles and employee revolts over remote work.

Executive management at the companies trying to restore in-person work culture claim that working together in a physical space allows for greater collaboration and innovation.

Research on this topic has offered mixed insights, but there does seem to be some consensus that remote work is accompanied by very modest drops in productivity—for example, a working study at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research suggested around a 10 percent drop in productivity, even as it noted that the cost-saving benefits of remote work could make up for some of that.