Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt takes back criticism of remote work

“Google has decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home is more important than winning,” Schmidt said in the recording. “And the reason startups work is because people work like hell.”

Schmidt surmised that those who go on to start a company “aren’t going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete with the other startups.”

The former Google CEO now appears to be retracting his claims. In an email to The Wall Street Journal, Schmidt said he “misspoken about Google and their business hours.”

“I regret my mistake,” he told The Journal.

Schmidt did not elaborate. A spokesman for Schmidt did not immediately return a request for comment.

But the former Google boss struck a note that many tech CEOs have said before about remote work — even if the research on the topic isn’t exactly conclusive.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune Magazine in 2023 that he believed one of the tech industry’s “biggest mistakes” was allowing employees to go “completely remote forever.”

“I would say the experiment in that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be completely remote forever, especially with startups,” he told the magazine.

OpenAI, for its part, still implements a combination of hybrid and remote policies.

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the company requires its in-person employees to come into the office three days a week, while also keeping some remote workers.

Google has a similar policy that requires most workers to come in at least three days a week, according to a company blog.

A Google spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, once a self-proclaimed chronic telecommuter, has also promoted the belief that some employees need to be in the office.

“They have to blend in-person and remote together,” Benioff said. “Our engineers are extremely productive at home. We have a lot of people who are extremely productive at home. But there also needs to be salespeople who are productive in the office.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “people who work from home are not efficient, and engineers who come to the office work more,” citing the company’s internal performance data to justify his position.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2023 called remote work “morally wrong” during an interview with CNBC.

But the research on the impact of remote work on productivity is not unanimous. Some studies have shown an increase in productivity, while others have shown a negative impact. An analysis by Goldman Sachs said the discrepancy may be due to the way productivity is measured, BI previously reported.

A research paper which analyzed 20 million scientific studies and 4 million patent applications, however, showed that working in person is more conducive to innovation, BI’s Aki Ito reported.

“I wouldn’t say all companies should go back to being fully on-site,” Oxford University economist Carl Benedikt Frey, who co-authored the study, told BI. “But if you think about it just from the perspective of trying to develop innovative technologies, you should probably be on site as much as possible.”