Is it a double standard to talk up remote working while wanting as many staff in your office as possible?

Thats a question that some of the biggest tech multinationals in Ireland might now face.

On one hand, Google (8,000 workers), Facebook (4,500 workers), Microsoft (2,500 workers) and others extol the benefits of working flexibly from home. On the other, none want to downsize their truly massive Irish office campuses.

How do they square these seemingly contradictory positions?

In two ways. First, tech multinationals have invested a hell of a lot of cash in those Irish offices. Google is now one of the biggest property investors in Dublin 4, having sunk 1.1bn into its multiple buildings there. Microsoft recently spent 134m on its own Sandyford campus.

And Facebook, while it doesnt own its new Ballsbridge headquarters, is also nevertheless spending a fortune on its long-term development.

In Cork, Apple recently opened a large new extension on its Holyhill campus. It employs over 6,000 workers in the southern city.

Its not just the physical space, either. The layouts and facilities in some of these office buildings is state-of-the-art. They generally set the pace for almost everyone else, inside and outside the tech sector.

So theres a powerful instinct against ditching an office-first work environment, no matter how eloquent they make remote working sound.

Even if they had not sunk so many millions (or billions) into their buildings, these goliaths have other reasons to want workers back under one roof.

For all the enlightened talk about productivity outside the office, the core Silicon Valley work culture is still based around collaboration through physical presence. And its not, as cynics sometimes suggest, to keep you locked up under their supervision. Tech companies have had a productivity edge for years because of the way they organise their offices, from project workflows to reporting systems between colleagues and managers. Its one of the reasons why young people rate them so highly as a first or second employer -- they learn far more about how to get stuff done, to an elite tech standard, than in many other workplaces. That culture, executives say, is far more difficult to nurture or grow when key staff are confined to their bedroom, kitchen or parents house, only interacting with colleagues at specified Zoom call times.

This is particularly the case with workers who came to work in Dublin from other countries. Part of the draw for them is to be physically located in the office of Google, Facebook, Microsoft or any one of the dozens of high-end tech offices here. If offices remain closed, and key staff are sitting with a laptop in a small apartment kitchen, theres a risk not only to tighter collaboration on work projects but also to retaining these (mostly continental European) staff in the first place.

And that brings up another major problem -- tax. If a French, Dutch or Spanish worker tries to go home and still work for the Dublin-based company, there are significant tax and regulatory implications. This is one reason why none of the big tech multinationals allows permanent relocation from outside the country as part of a remote working setup.

But the longer the offices here remain closed, the harder it is to keep all of these staff physically in the country.

Tech bosses, from Mark Zuckerberg down, have conceded that some staff will work flexibly forever. But the rest, it is hoped, will be back in their offices soon.

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Tech giants thrive on collaboration and need staff back in offices - Independent.ie