Starbucks office workers will risk losing their jobs if they fail to comply with the company’s hybrid work requirement that employees are in the office three times a week.
According to the Wall Street Journal an internal message sent to employees warns that an “accountability process” will start in January 2025. Consequences for non-compliance are “up to, and including, separation”, according to the company message.
“We are continuing to support our leaders as they hold their teams accountable to our existing hybrid work policy,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg News, which first reported the company message.
The message said the company will no longer make Tuesday a required in-office day, leaving it up to managers to determine the best day for their teams. The three-day office policy has been in place for two years.
Starbucks’s new CEO, Brian Niccol, has faced criticism for taking a corporate jet to commute nearly 1,000 miles from his home in Newport Beach, California, to Starbucks headquarters office in Seattle, Washington, three times a week. Starbucks claimed the CEO will meet or exceed the company’s hybrid work requirements. Niccol assumed the role in September 2024 after departing as CEO of Chipotle. At Chipotle, Niccol required employees to be in the office four days a week.
Last month, Niccol said employees should be wherever they need to be to perform their jobs, claiming that the office is most often that place.
“This is not a game of tracking. This is a game of winning,” said Niccol during a forum to employees at Starbucks headquarters. “I care about seeing everybody here succeed, and if success requires us being together more often than not, let’s be together more often.”
Corporations have been enacting return-to-office mandates this year as remote and hybrid work became common at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
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Amazon recently enacted a full return-to-office mandate scheduled to be implemented on 2 January, with the Amazon Web Services CEO, Matt Garman, telling employees during an all-hands staff meeting: “If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s OK, there are other companies around.”