“We decided to go back in September. we became haters between hybrid model. We believe it’s important for every team to connect with an office space and make it their own: decorate their corners, hang their flags, have their screens, their measurements… And that’s not happening right now because we don’t have seats for everyone. You are turning. You have a different region each day, so Little interaction with the field you are working in and teams never seen”.
Glovo CEO Óscar Pierre explained with these words, your company’s new remote work policy. He did so in a speech hosted on YouTube three weeks ago by Itnig, a startup incubator in Barcelona. White-collar workers (technology, operations, marketing…) moved to a new building in Barcelona’s 22@ technology district at the end of last year. A little over six months have passed and they are already under construction, Pierre said, because the idea they had about “office future” turned out to be wrong.
The new facilities, with a capacity of 1,700 people, are designed to include closed rooms for quiet work and “very” unused rest areas, with the assumption that each team will go to the office for two days. With the new course, those in charge decided that: everyone arrives in the same three days —Monday Tuesday and Thursday— so they need to expand their business.
“There are 5-10% of people who don’t like anything. and we lost some talent. But this is a change of philosophy. We want to control it and create that environment,” the CEO justified. Pierre also said that between two competing companies, according to him, the employee is more likely to win. “in a garage with brutal energy” than completely remote.
Glovo isn’t the first major Spanish tech company to change its office assistance policy. At the end of March, Avi Meir, CEO of TravelPerk, a Barcelona-based corporate travel management software with a global workforce of 1,200 people, said: all employees must attend at least three days weekly. Since and until the outbreak of the pandemic, the company has “no policy” on remote working: anyone could work from anywhere.
What caused the change a little rebellion Sifted reported that he was among the members of the engineering team. The company received a hundred requests from workers seeking exemptions and approved 75% of them, according to its data. But in the long run, CEO Avi Meir wrote: “The general rule is, human interaction should take place in real life, not in the metaverse (…) The important thing is that encounters happen in person.”
Human resources app Factorial, which recently laid off about twenty people and whose executives joked about it on a podcast, used to run its entire product team remotely, but soon the CEO announced they would try. “Spend more face-to-face time together and recruit new people close to the office.”
Less distance delivers 100%
The trickle of news about Spanish ‘tech’ companies hardening their rhetoric against remote working is similar to what’s going on in the United States. There, giants like Google, Amazon, Apple or Salesforce spent months getting workers to return to the office after a few weekdays. Open bar caused by the pandemic.
Pedro Torrecillas, founder and CEO of the Circular technological employment platform, who was interested in how this discourse was translated into new job offers, received the data. He noted it for a few months. percentage of offers that allow full remote —total remote work — is falling.
It has a circular base 12,000 offers. All of them are on product or development teams of tech companies, and the majority (around 80%) are Spanish. Offers that allow 100% remote work without ever going to the office have started to increase during the pandemic period. It reached a peak of 69% in May 2022. They’ve been down ever since and are currently standing at 57%. Excludes hybrid options like Glovo or Travelperk, which require a face-to-face day.
“I think what’s happening is a mirror of what’s happening in the US,” Torrecillas says in an interview with EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA of the Prensa Ibérica group. “There is an idea productivity is lost when working remotely. There are companies that allow a hybrid model from there, others are more flexible with their tech teams… There are also those who believe this is the case. a way to reduce staff, separation of those who have already moved with another”.
With the closing of the cheap money faucet recently, and interest rates started to rise, technology companies saw the need to cut costs. “One way to do that is to fire people or wait for them to leave,” adds Torrecillas, whose 14-employee company is 100% away from the start. “Efficiency depends on how you set it up, but you gain many other things in return.like holding.
While not every company has data on the reasons for rejecting the remote, he believes most of them want people to go because they pay rent. CEOs also like to see their employees there, and they often live so close that they are ‘not hurt’ by their commute. “Generally, executives and higher positions can afford to live closer to the office. Not everyone is fifteen minutes away like them,” he concludes.
Office demand is changing but not disappearing
Pandemic and temporary establishment of remote work shook the real estate industry, actually testing the conversion of already empty offices into homes.
According to the data of real estate consultancy Savills, although the number of operations decreased in both Madrid and Barcelona, the demand for offices did not disappear. “The advent of hybrid models to companies has been accompanied by fears of falling hiring rates for their main owners’ offices,” says the consultant’s latest report on the Barcelona office market. “However, remote work does not replace the office, it helps reconciliation. The numbers support this fact: Activity has slowed down not because of reduced demand, but because of excess supply.”
Anna Gener, CEO of Savills in Barcelona, made a statement recently. argument in favor of offices. Gener, like the CEOs of the technology sector, “creates emotional bonds”, “transmits the corporate culture”, “it is very important for the training of the youngest profiles” and “promote the well-being of the human team”Among other things.
In Madrid, the same consulting firm acknowledges that many small companies have moved from traditional offices to offices or flexible positions, but hiring remains similar to that in 2022. “Education sector, lThe main players of the office market in the capital are flexible spaces and the technology sector.they are pointing.