Microsoft CEO Says That The "Permanent Work From Home" Decision Can Be Dangerous For The Corporate Culture

Finally, someone has opposed the idea of working from home and he is no other than Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella who has openly expressed his opinion regarding the new work culture during an interview with the New York Times.

According to him, the remote work strategy can lead to negative consequences for people including less social interaction and bad mental health.

Nadella believes that when employees go to an office or walk into a physical meeting, that interaction with other human beings is so important to stimulate the feeling of competitiveness, and satisfaction, which if not given can stop encouraging employees to do great things and even struggle with their own mental well being. There is a sense of connection which cannot be achieved virtually,

This is an interesting statement coming from Nadella as Microsoft was one of the first companies to allow their employees to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CEO believes that moving forward with remote work culture would be like moving from one dogma to another dogma.

Nadella, during the interview further questioned that how does burnout looks like? What does mental health look like? And on top of it all, he asked what does connectivity and building community look like? Which was the exact point of his whole argument The CEO of Microsoft thinks that we are actually burning social capital which the world took years to build.

These comments from Nadella came out after the rival company Twitter decided to let employees work from home even after the coronavirus pandemic. The reason behind Twitter’s bold move has been the well-distributed workforce that is capable of working from anywhere and managing the platform well at home. Besides that Twitter took the decision with a mutual understanding of its employees.

The only employees that are required to go to the office are the ones who may have to maintain the company’s servers.


Despite all the arguments, on the business forefront, Microsoft has remained to be one of the very few companies that had to face “minimal net impact” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sales in the third quarter rose to 15% summing up to 35 billion and much of the credit for this success goes to the emerging use of cloud computing. The revenue of the personal computing segment also climbed 3% to 11 billion which was a surprise jump considering how the company wasn’t expecting to exceed its revenue target of $10.75 billion to $11.15 billion.

Microsoft is currently enjoying the wall street expected revenue of $33.4 billion and earnings per share of $1.26.


Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Read next: Study Reveals Working from Home Affects Productivity by only 1 Percent
Previous Post Next Post