American Express goes hybrid - WFH on Mondays & Fridays for 64,000 employees 💯‍

American Express is the latest large company to go remote. The finance giant is planning to open its offices in the US & UK starting September and experiment with the hybrid model from the first week of October.

Office will still be the primary place of work for everyone, however, employees will have a choice to WFH on Mondays & Fridays.

AmEx wants to retain the aspects of virtual working that have worked well

Steve Squeri, AmEx CEO, said that virtual working has helped them:

- Bring greater inclusivity across their employees globally

- Improve work-life balance

- Have an enhanced digital mindset and

- Get work done cutting through bureaucracy

By going hybrid, they want to reap the benefits of working in-office & remotely.

But he also said that they are very much in the learning & experimentation mode with this. They will have to try and see what works best.

Remote work movement is gaining pace and building pressure on companies

Many recent surveys have revealed that employees don't want to get back to office and would rather quit if forced to do so.

So while leaders of companies like AmEx come forward to praise remote working and embrace it, the major factor driving the decision is to retain their existing employees & keep them happy.

Another proof for this is Amazon's recent U-turn of first declaring that they would remain office-centric and later saying that they would be embracing hybrid remote.

I still strongly feel that these are great first steps and I don't want to take anything away from these companies. They are way better than the ones that are extremely adamant and ignorant of this large-scale change (ex. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan).

However, hybrid remote is a very tricky model to tackle on a large scale and these companies may see a lot of surprises along the way.