Return-to-office drama at Dyson shows divide over working from home

financialpost.com:

Six weeks into the United Kingdom’s first pandemic lockdown, employees at the British engineering group Dyson Ltd. received an email from chief executive Roland Krueger.

The U.K. campus, a sprawling complex in rural Wiltshire, had “reopened,”said the May 15, 2020 email.

The government had announced five days earlier that people who were unable to work from home could return to the workplace. Staff at Dyson Technology Ltd., best known for its innovative vacuum cleaners and air filters, would be organized into A and B teams and expected to return to the Malmesbury office the following Monday.

But schools and non-essential shops were still shut, and businesses that could were working remotely. The virus was still rampant; on the day the email was sent, 1,337 people testing positive for COVID-19 were on ventilators in U.K. hospitals.

The decision was reversed less than 24 hours later following uproar by staff, and working from home was allowed to carry on as before.

Yet this early clash marked the opening of a cultural divide at the company: between the top executives who took a granite-hard approach to in-person staffing as lockdowns lifted, and a group of employees who balked at the ever-stricter measures Dyson took to ensure attendance at its U.K. headquarters.

Interviews with 27 employees who have now left the company paint a picture of how senior staff at the U.K. campus upheld uncompromising restrictions in the months after the corporate world reopened.

Staff were subjected to rigorous monitoring and warned of professional consequences if they failed to attend in person. Some former employees say flexible working requests were overwhelmingly declined, and some describe feeling pressured to leave children and dependants