Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has quickly walked back comments criticizing his old company’s remote-work policy, which he blamed for AI challenges and falling behind competitors.
“I misspoke about Google and their work hours,” Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal. “I regret my error.”
A recording of his recent lecture at Stanford University, which was posted on the college’s YouTube channel on Tuesday, earned more than 40,000 views as of Wednesday afternoon before it was taken down.
In the video, Schmidt claimed that Google has lost the lead in AI to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic because of its stance on working from home.
“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt told students. “And the reason startups work is because the people work like hell.”
“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” Schmidt, who left Google for good in 2020, continued.
“But the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups.”
Schmidt asked for the controversial video to be taken down, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Schmidt didn’t elaborate further or respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
The former chief executive held Google’s helm from 2001 to 2011, and served as executive chairman until 2018. He then sat on Alphabet’s board until 2019 and stayed on as a technical advisor until February 2020.
Is Google’s WFH policy really holding the company back?
Schmidt’s initial claim that Google’s lack of innovation in the AI department was due to staff working from home more than those at OpenAI fell immediately flat. As Fortune noted, the companies have the same three-day in-office policy.
Likewise, Anthropic workers are allowed to work from home for 75% of the workweek.
“Flexible work arrangements don’t slow down our work,” Alphabet Workers Union, which represents more than 1,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada, hit back in a post on X.
“Understaffing, shifting priorities, constant layoffs, stagnant wages, and lack of follow-through from management on projects—these factors slow Google workers down every day.”
CEOs think WFH kills productivity—research shows otherwise
Although the ex-Google chief is now walking back his complaint that people are killing productivity by not going into the office enough, it’s one that workers have heard on repeat for the past two years.
Elon Musk’s distaste for remote working is perhaps the most well-documented—the billionaire made it his first order of business to end Twitter’s “work from anywhere” policy when he took over and turned it into today’s “hardcore” X.
He has taken the same approach at SpaceX and Tesla, where he wants workers in the office for at least 40 hours a week.
“All the Covid stay-at-home stuff has tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard,” he previously wrote on X.
His point of view is bold but not uncommon: JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon told the Economist that working from home “doesn’t really work for creativity and spontaneity.”
Meanwhile, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg took a sharp U-turn on his vision for a “forward-leaning” remote company when he demanded workers return to the office in 2023—because those who work in person “get more done.”
However, research on the impact of WFH on productivity says otherwise.
A major study from Stanford workplace guru Nick Bloom recently revealed that hybrid work not only cuts attrition by 33%, but it 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 the slump in productivity.
After proving during the pandemic that they can work just as efficiently from home as chained to a desk, workers who are now being forced to return to the office are voting with their feet—or sucking it up, but giving minimal effort.
