Uber is asking nearly all remote employees to move to an office near their team.
Uber ‘s memo to staff on Wednesday cut about 3,300 jobs, but the line that changes daily life for everyone still employed is the one about working from home. Fully remote roles will be capped at roughly 1% of the workforce, down from a share built up over five years of hiring people wherever they happened to live. For a company that will have just under 30,000 employees once the cuts are done, that turns a layoff announcement into a relocation notice for a large part of the staff it is keeping. That 1% is the number to hold on to.
The three-day-a-week hybrid policy stays, and Uber says it will keep pushing for compliance with it. Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi framed the reversal around what he said Uber has learned since the pandemic, that sitting together and solving problems in person works better than the alternative. The memo says Uber is “asking the vast majority of remote employees to move to an office”, which is a polite way of saying the job now comes with a postcode.
The company is ending remote work as a normal way to work at Uber. Everyone else who works from home is being asked to move to an office. It is not a target or a preference, it is a ceiling, and it applies globally.
Uber has cut the number of employees sitting seven or more layers below the CEO by 20% and halved the number of teams with only one or two direct reports. Waymo runs through Uber’s app in Austin and Atlanta while expanding elsewhere on its own, Tesla is pushing driverless rides, and Uber plans to spend more than $10 billion to stay the marketplace those cars plug into. Analysts estimate annual savings of up to $2 billion.
Uber has not said which offices are worst hit by the job cuts, so people in smaller locations are dealing with two questions at once, whether their role survives and whether it survives in the city they live in. Khosrowshahi said revenue has nearly tripled in five years and left behind layers, coordination and unclear ownership. Uber said everyone affected by the job cuts has already been told. It has not said the same about the remote employees now expected to relocate.
The company has drawn up rules for where each kind of team belongs. Global teams go to New York and San Francisco. Regional teams go to designated regional hubs, local teams to country hubs, and engineering to tech hubs. Managers will be placed with their own teams wherever Uber can manage it, and early-career employees are singled out as the group that should not be sitting alone. Plenty of companies have a hybrid policy on paper that nobody counts. Uber is saying it will count. Three days a week in the office remains the standard, and the memo commits to reinforcing compliance rather than leaving it to managers. Read alongside the hub consolidation, that is what makes the move harder than a typical return-to-office push. Attendance is measured against a specific building, and Uber has decided which building that is. The layoffs themselves are about flattening. Three delivery operations teams covering restaurants, retail and direct commerce are merging, and in engineering, Core Services Engineering and Science are being combined. He did not blame artificial intelligence, which sets this apart from most technology layoffs this year. The pressure is competitive. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.