Employees reportedly threaten to quit after CEO backtracks on remote-work policy: 'I sold my house and moved closer to my grandkids'
Farmers Group announced changes to its remote-work policy, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Most employees have been told to work from the office three days a week, starting in September.
Since then, many employees have reportedly expressed frustration and anger about the change.
Workers at the insurance giant Farmers Group are reportedly threatening to quit or unionize after the company's new CEO backtracked on its remote-work policy.
Employees expressed their frustrations with the decision by flooding a Farmers Group internal social-media platform with more than 2,000 comments, The Wall Street Journal, which reviewed screenshots of the reactions, reported. Workers who commented on the platform said that they were considering leaving their jobs or forming a union, with one saying that they were hired with the promise that remote work would be allowed moving forward, the Journal reported.
"I sold my house and moved closer to my grandkids," another worker's comment read, according to the Journal. "So sad that I made a huge financial decision based on a lie."
Farmers Group CEO Raul Vargas, who took over the position in January, announced last month that most employees would be required to work from the office three days a week, the Journal reported.
The Farmers Group spokesperson Carly Kraft told Insider over email that the company would shift to this hybrid-work policy in September. She said these employees had three months' notice to "adjust and make arrangements." The hybrid-policy change would impact roughly 60% of the company's employees, Kraft wrote.
The policy change was "a blended approach we believe will allow us to continue offering the flexibility that we all value while reaping the benefits of the office environment," the statement continued. "Our intent is to foster greater collaboration, creativity and innovation while also providing better opportunities for learning, training, mentoring, career development and organic interaction."
Vargas's decision mirrors that of a growing list of companies calling workers back to the office — some of which have enforced return-to-office mandates. Last week, Meta said employees would be required to work three days a week in-office starting in September. Amazon employees recently staged a walkout to protest the company's return-to-office plans.
Executives who have announced these changes have emphasized a belief that working in-person would boost worker productivity and collaboration. After workers grew accustomed to flexible-work policies during the pandemic, however, these policies are prompting an outcry from many workers across industries.
Some Farmers Group employees had the impression that their former remote policy was a "permanent change," as one worker commented on the internal social-media platform, according to the Journal. In 2022, when Jeff Dailey was CEO, working in-person was optional, managers told the publication.
"The decision to embrace virtual work at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 was one that made sense at the time," Kraft, the spokesperson, told Insider, "and adopting a hybrid approach in September 2023 is what makes sense for our organization now."
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