Dell Goes Full RTO. Will Employees Comply This Time?

Source: Reworked, Lance Haun
Photo: Dell

Employees called Dell’s bluff when it announced only in-office employees were eligible for promotions. How will employees respond to the new RTO mandate?

Last summer, technology behemoth Dell offered a novel, but misguided, solution to get people back to the office: Commit to hybrid work or say goodbye to promotions. Nearly half their employees chose to stay remote, preferring this mode of work over the possibility of moving up the ladder.

At the time, it seemed clear this wasn’t a workable solution. As a work leader, you can’t have half your workforce opt-out of career advancement and hope to keep the business strong. Something had to change.

Change it did. Late last month, according to a memo published on Business Insider, Dell ordered all employees back to the office five days a week starting in March. The only exception will be people who live more than an hour from a Dell office, who will remain ineligible for promotion.

It’s an about-face, and one that leaves Dell even less flexible with work location than they were before the pandemic. What happened and what went wrong?

We’re Never Going Back

Not every company was as vocal as Dell when it came to disseminating their views about the future of work post-pandemic.

In an August 2020 earnings call, COO and vice chairman Jeff Clarke told investors work was going to look different going forward. “After all of this investment to enable remote everything, we will never go back to the way things were before,” he said. “Here at Dell, we expect, on an ongoing basis, that 60% of our workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week.”

Founder and CEO Michael Dell doubled down two years later. In September 2022, he shared on LinkedIn that he expected employees to continue to choose the way they worked best and that, critically, there had been no perceived performance gaps between in-office, hybrid and remote workers. The post also noted that 65% of Dell employees had worked either remote or hybrid prior to 2020.

The beginning of the end started in 2024. The company mandated that sales teams work a hybrid schedule in March, which later turned into a full-time, in-office schedule. They followed this with their “hybrid work for promotions” bribe, which didn’t work as well as they hoped. While some remote employees reportedly scattered for greener pastures, others seemed content waiting things out to see if Dell was really bluffing.

Dell Was a Hybrid and Remote Workplace Success Story

When you see a remote work about-face, the financials can often explain why. Whether dealing with a bloated payroll or wanting more granular control over their workforce, poor financial performance is often the driving force.

That wasn’t the case for Dell. Like most tech companies, its stock price tanked in the early days of the pandemic and skyrocketed out of it. But unlike a lot of its tech peers, it had strong 2023 and 2024 financial performance. Dell stock price is approximately 20% higher than it was a year ago (and nearly seven times what it was in March 2020). The nature of Dell’s business, with its diverse mix of enterprise, small business and consumer technology, appears to be a winning formula.

Ironically, its business has thrived not in spite of, but because of the shifting landscape. It even offered advisory services for organizations on how to navigate hybrid work on top of the technology that promises to deliver productivity from day one.

Of course, that runs counter to what CEO Michael Dell claims in his memo. “What we’re finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction,” he wrote. “A 30-second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes on for hours or even days.”

For a company that’s the backbone for a lot of remote and hybrid operations, this seem like a bad message to send. If Dell, the people who design, build and consult on the latest technology to enable hybrid and remote work can’t figure it out (like getting communications out of email for starters), who can?

Why Did Dell Reverse Course?

It makes the reversal all the more confusing. Dell isn’t simply backtracking; it’s changing course from where its policies were in 2019. It had a stellar reputation for being an employee experience conscious company. Michael Dell was beloved for being a rebel in a hustle-first tech culture and tried to balance empowerment and reducing burnout with accountability.

It’s hard to square that Dell’s decade’s-long policy of work flexibility disappeared for no reason. Maybe, in spite of its financial performance, it needs to lower its payrolls. Perhaps we can take Dell at his word that the pace of change in technology is just too fast for hybrid and remote work to keep up. That being in-person all the time makes a group of people more performant.

Or, perhaps, there are a lot of unknowns about what the future of Dell looks like in an AI-forward IT and business environment. Michael Dell holds the largest amount of Dell stock of anyone (nearly half) and second place is not even close. Tightening the grip on the workforce might seem like a safe approach to ensure their massive post-pandemic gains stay put.

Dell knows that people are still an important factor, even in the tech business. And he might get reminded that top people always have choices. Dell employees who continued with remote work were hoping for a bluff. Now that Dell has shown its commitment to a less flexible work environment, it’s up to them.

About the Author

Lance Haun is a leadership and technology columnist for Reworked. He has spent nearly 20 years researching and writing about HR, work and technology.

https://www.reworked.co/employee-experience/dell-goes-full-rto-will-employees-comply-this-time