Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt apologizes for remote debate against old employer

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt quickly pushed back on comments criticizing his old company’s remote work policy, which he blamed for AI challenges and falling behind competitors.

“We misspoke about Google and their business hours,” Schmidt said Wall Street Journal. “I regret my mistake.”

A recording of his recent lecture at Stanford University, which was posted to the college’s YouTube channel on Tuesday, had gained more than 40,000 views by Wednesday afternoon before it was removed.

In the video, Schmidt argued that Google has lost its lead in AI to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic because of its stance on working from home.

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

“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” continued Schmidt, who is leaving Google for good in 2020.

“But the truth is, if you all leave university and go start a company, you’re not going to let people work from home and you’re only going to come in one day a week if you want to compete with the other startups.”

Schmidt called for the controversial video to be removed, according to him Wall Street Journal.

Schmidt did not elaborate further and did not respond wealthrequests for his comments.

The former CEO held Google’s leadership from 2001 to 2011 and served as executive chairman until 2018. He then served on Alphabet’s board of directors until 2019 and remained as a technical advisor until February 2020.

Is Google’s WFH policy really holding the company back?

Schmidt’s initial claim that GoogleThe lack of innovation in the AI ​​department was due to staff working from home more than those at OpenAI immediately fell. That wealth noted, the companies have the same three-day policy in the office.

Human workers are also allowed to work from home for 75% of the work week.

“Flexible work arrangements do not slow our work,” the Alphabet Workers Union, which represents more than 1,000 workers in the US and Canada, responded in a post on X.

“Staff churn, shifting priorities, constant layoffs, stagnant pay, and lack of management follow-through on projects — these factors slow down Googlers every day.”

CEOs think WFH destroys productivity – research shows otherwise

Although the former Google boss is now walking back his complaint that people are killing productivity by not going to the office enough, it’s one workers have heard repeatedly over the past two years.

Elon Musk’s distaste for remote working is perhaps best documented – the billionaire made it his first act to end Twitter’s ‘work from anywhere’ policy when he took it over and turned it into X” hardcore” of today.

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He’s taken the same approach at SpaceX and Tesla, where he wants office workers at least 40 hours a week.

“All the stay-at-home stuff from Covid has fooled people into thinking you don’t actually have to work hard,” he previously wrote on X.

His view is bold, but not unusual: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said Economist that working from home “doesn’t really work for creativity and spontaneity.”

Meanwhile, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg took a sharp turn in his vision for a “forward-leaning” remote company when he called for workers to return to the office in 2023 — because in-person workers “do more “.

However, research on the impact of WFH on productivity says otherwise.

A major study by Stanford workplace guru Nick Bloom recently revealed that hybrid work not only reduces attrition by 33%, but has no negative impact on performance or productivity.

It found that flexible arrangements improve productivity by 1% and generate “millions of dollars in savings” for businesses.

Research actually points to RTO mandates as one of the main reasons for declining productivity.

After proving during the pandemic that they can work from home as effectively as chained to an office, workers who are now forced to return to the office are voting with their feet — or sucking, but putting in minimal effort.

This story was originally published on Fortune.com