Yelp to Shutter Offices July 29 in Chicago, New York, Washington

Yelp will close what it called its three most consistently underutilized offices July 29—Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.—along with reducing its footprint at its facility in Phoenix. Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman explained in a blog post that since the company began reopening its offices nine months ago, with a remote-first approach, roughly 1% of its workforce globally has chosen to come into the office every day, and the three offices it is closing were seeing a weekly average utilization of below 2% of available workspaces. He wrote, “As we continue to embrace a fully remote workplace and design the future of remote work at Yelp, we plan to reallocate resources toward our employee experience, new talent and the growth of our business. Additionally, our in-person gatherings will continue to evolve as we reimagine the long-held paradigms around work.” Approaches to the return to work have varied across the industry. While Meta continues to remain flexible in terms of where its employees can work, then-Facebook leased all 730,000 square feet of office space in The Farley Building, formerly the James A. Farley Post Office, in Manhattan in August 2020, during the thick of the pandemic. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said in March that while the company’s offices worldwide would open March 15, employees were free to choose how they worked. He wrote in a note to employees, “As we open back up, our approach remains the same. Wherever you feel most productive and creative is where you will work, and that includes working from home full-time forever. Office every day? That works, too. Some days in office, some days from home? Of course. That’s actually how most of you feel.” However, Elon Musk’s pending takeover of Twitter is a threat to change all of that, as Musk revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing May 5 that he would serve as interim CEO once the transaction closes. Musk issued a mandate at Tesla, one of the other companies he runs, that employees had to spend at least 40 hours per week in the offices where they were intended to work, but he appeared to soften his stance a bit when it came to Twitter. Shirin Ghaffary of Recode shared a leaked transcript of Musk’s first town hall meeting with Twitter employees earlier this month, and he said of remote work, “Now, Tesla makes cars, and you cannot make cars remotely, obviously. You have to make cars in a big factory, and the supply chain, and you have to bring in the parts, and assemble them, and then transport the car to the owner. All of these things must be done in person because it’s physically impossible to do them remotely. There are some roles at Tesla where the work can be done remotely, like, say, software or design—I think that’s still a case where you want to aspire to do things in person, but if somebody is exceptional at their job, then it’s possible for them to be effective, even working remotely. So, with Tesla, I have simply asked for a list—that the manager has to confirm—that they’re an excellent contributor, and if they do, they’re allowed to work remotely. So, it’s pretty basic, I think. There is a hit one takes, remotely, because it does reduce esprit de corps and it kind of matters to be in person, at least some of the time. So, one of the things I’ve said is that even if somebody’s working remotely, they have got to show up at the office occasionally so that they recognize their colleagues and don’t walk down the street and pass your colleagues and you don’t recognize them. That would not be good.”