Workers unhappily return to offices as pandemic ends

Conflict between management and labor is growing over work-from-home policies.

View of Pangyo Techno Valley, Gyeonggi [LIM HYUN-DONG]

Conflict between management and labor is growing over work-from-home policies.

With Covid restrictions eased, more and more companies are demanding employees to return to the workplace.

Managers cite a decline in work productivity and difficult communication, while employees say they can concentrate better at home.

Telecom service provider LG U+ reduced the number of days workers are allowed to work at home from twice weekly to once weekly from April.

“We’ve changed the work system following the eased Covid-19 quarantine guidelines,” said a spokesperson for LG U+.

Instead of abolishing it entirely, “we’ve reduced the number of days to lessen side effects,” said the spokesperson.

SK Telecom also cut the number of days employees can work at home from February to once weekly.

Before, the system operated independently depending on the division.

Lotte Shopping ended its teleworking system from March 20.

Tech firms, known for their unconstrained work environment, also scrapped the system.

Mobility startup Socar abolished the telework system earlier this month. It had previously allowed workers to work from home twice a week.

“We’ve converted to a normal commute system after concluding that face-to-face work is more efficient,” said a spokesperson for Socar.

Kakao and Tving, as well as game companies Nexon and Netmarble, also adopted a similar system requiring workers to return to the office.

Workers are dissatisfied with the change.

“I was able to concentrate better at work from time saved commuting and I have grown sufficiently used to teleworking,” said a 34-year-old from an IT company. “It feels bitter in that the company is trying to monitor employees.”

Another worker said, “I already feel suffocated at the thought of having to ride a subway during rush hour.”

There were 95,000 teleworkers before the pandemic in 2019, according to the Ministry of Employment and Labor. The number jumped significantly to 1.14 million in 2021 but shrunk back to 960,000 last year.

The trend is global.

From August to September 2022, 72.5 percent of establishments in the United States had little or no telework, up from 60.1 percent in July through September 2021, according to a survey released by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics in March.

Difficult communications, reduced work productivity and aggravated earnings are some of the reasons companies are ending telework.

“We’ve normalized the work environment with the eased government quarantine restrictions,” said a spokesperson for Lotte Home Shopping. “But it’s also true that the need to raise efficiency through office work affected our decision.”

“Productivity fell from telework, and internally, we blame that for the aggravated earnings,” said a spokesperson for another company that wished to speak anonymously.

But employees argue that a lot of companies enjoyed improved earning when the pandemic was rampant, and that this performance would not have been possible had there been problems working from home.

“Telework wasn’t adopted as part of welfare policy, but people have come to recognize it as a right, and abolishing it is sparking resistance from workers,” said Kim Kwang-hyun, a business professor at Korea University Business School. “Management mustn't have considered the need to convince workers about normalizing the work environment,” Kim added, noting that companies in Silicon Valley have increased welfare to bring workers back to the office.

BY KO SUK-HYUN [jin.minji@joongang.co.kr]