General Motors has set the end of January as the time to start bringing U.S. salaried employees back to the office for at least three days a week, the Free Press has learned.
Earlier this week, GM department heads started meeting with their teams to discuss the automaker’s plans to bring the workforce back to the office on a more regular schedule, people familiar with the plans told the Free Press. The people asked to not reveal their identity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
GM spokeswoman Maria Raynal stopped short of confirming the timing, but said the company is talking to employees about the policy for returning to the office.
“After engaging with teams and listening to feedback, GM leaders are in the process of sharing the next steps of our Work Appropriately evolution with employees as we create a flexible model with a more regular in-person cadence across the company,” Raynal said in an email statement to the Free Press.
Starting Jan. 30, GM plans to require a minimum of three days a week in the office, though there will be flexibility depending on the job and department, three people familiar with the policy told the Free Press.
Last month, late in the day on a Friday, CEO Mary Barra sent a note to GM’s salaried workforce saying employees who have been working remotely due to the pandemic will be required to return to the office at least three days a week, starting later this year.
A few days later, after employee backlash, Barra retreated on the mandate offering an apology of sorts for the “unfortunate” timing of the initial notice. She explained that GM’s plan still will include a more regular, in-person presence, but it will not implement any changes to its return-to-the-office policy this year as the company continues to listen to employee feedback. But GM’s plan would remain the same: to ask employees to work in-office three days each week.
There is some resentment that two of GM’s senior leaders — CFO Paul Jacobson and Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation Alan Wexler — who signed the return-to-work policy, have “work from home” listed on their company profiles in GM’s internal directory. The Free Press confirmed the profiles do list Jacobson as “work from home – Georgia” and Wexler as “work from home – Wyoming.”
When asked whether Jacobson and Wexler will continue to work remotely, Raynal said, “I don’t have any knowledge of anyone’s plans or schedules at this time.”
GM has about 5,000 employees assigned to its world headquarters in the Renaissance Center in Detroit, about 25,000 at the GM Global Technical Center in Warren and about 4,500 employees at the Milford Proving Grounds.
For the past 24 months, many salaried employees either worked totally remote during the COVID-19 pandemic or worked a hybrid model called Work Appropriately. It allowed flexibility between working at the office and working remotely, letting employees and their manager decide where they could best do their specific jobs.
GM’s hourly workforce in its factories returned to the job after an eight-week shutdown during the peak of the pandemic in 2020. Many don’t identify with the salaried workers who resist going back to the office now.
“There’s not a lot of sympathy for them and I don’t know how you run a company from home?” Eric Welter, UAW Local 598 shop chairman at GM’s Flint Assembly plant, said in a previous interview. GM makes its Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra heavy-duty pickups at Flint Assembly.
Barra laid out her logic for bringing employees back to the office for three days a week in her initial note to the workforce last month, writing: “Over time, we have lost some of the important, intangible benefits of regularly working together in-person including, casual mentoring, more efficient communication and bringing an enterprise mindset to our work. We are entering a rapid launch cycle that, quite frankly, will define our future trajectory, and we need to drive change with speed — individually and collectively — so we can achieve our goals.”
Barra’s note explained that when GM introduced Work Appropriately in April 2021, “we took great care not to call it a policy, but rather a philosophy” to balance the needs of the company and to give employees flexibility.
Barra told the Free Press in May that there were days she often worked from her home in Northville or other remote locations.
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In her note to employees, Barra wrote that the pandemic has improved dramatically, allowing for a safe return to the office where GM’s push to transform the company will benefit from more in-person collaboration.
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Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.