Is hybrid work the worst of both worlds?

AFTER SEVERAL false starts, office workers are returning to their desks—for good this time, employers hope. As covid-19 restrictions are scaled back, . Financial giants such Wells Fargo have joined Wall Street titans such as JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley in urging people back to the office. The great return is afoot in big tech, too. Meta and Microsoft are asking employees to return by late March. Most big Silicon Valley campuses will be fuller from April. Many bosses share the sentiment of James Gorman, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive: if you can eat out, you can come to the office.For purveyors of remote-working tech, the gradual unwinding of the grand work-from-home experiment is already proving rough. Slack, a corporate-chat app owned by Salesforce, a software giant, projects slowing sales growth to 20% in the next quarter, year on year, down from 50% at the height of the pandemic. In February Zoom reported that growth had slowed globally, with revenues in Europe, the Middle East and Africa down by 9%, compared with a year earlier, and the number of its video-conferencing clients had declined relative to the previous quarter. Its market value has sunk as a result (see chart).