Mumbai: Markus Villig, CEO of Bolt, a European ride-hailing and delivery app that competes with Uber, has issued a clear stance against remote work. Villig described low office attendance as a “disgrace” and instructed employees to work from a Bolt office for 12 days a month starting in January, 2025. The company also released a memo to the staff asking them to show up in the office mandatorily. The company said that this will empower the employees to work flexibly and effectively.
As reported by Business Insider, Villig also criticised the “insanity” of employees working from vacation spots like Bali. In a memo to staff, he raised concerns about how low office attendance is affecting company culture, creativity, and overall performance.
Villig emphasised the need to “restart our ambitious culture,” citing examples of tech giants which have all enforced return-to-office policies to stay competitive and drive growth.
Here's The Memo Released By Bolt CEO Markus Villig To The Staff:
Following up from the All-hands on Tuesday I'll explain my thinking about the new Return to Office & Location policy and your role as a manager in supporting this transition.
The summary is that I deeply believe that we work better in person, not remotely.
The longer version is that we have a choice to make as a company. Either we restart our ambitious culture to compete in the highest league or we fall into mediocrity. Even the largest companies from Amazon to Tesla to Apple realise that in order to stay at the top they have to retain an intense culture and have got people back to office 3-5 days a week. We are a tiny company in comparison and to ever reach that scale we have to work harder and innovate more than them.
We have seen too much complacency in the last few years on how we recruit, where people live and when and where people work. We are too scattered, people feel disconnected, attrition is too high, and our offices lie empty. I find it a disgrace to our culture that less than 50% of employees come to the office +2 days per week.
We will return to being a high performance organisation from 1st of January:
Mandatory 12 days a month in office for all employees.
Min 2 days a week. Team leaders have the authority to do more – many sales teams do 5 already.
We have invested millions into having fantastic offices already, but in sites with lack of space we will set designated days per team to divide nicely.
Relative to the top tech companies we believe this is generous and allows plenty of flexibility to employees.
We will stop the insanity of people working remotely from places like Bali. That is a vacation not what we hired them to do.
Reducing the number of sites to 2 for global roles.
By default every department will have 2 hubs – Tallinn first and by default London secondary.
Some large departments like tech retain more. If you have questions, ask your department head.
In order for people to get the most value of being in office their team needs to be there. Some departments have scattered teams and we will consolidate that.
To be clear this refers to global roles, not local or regional.
There are 5 benefits to working in person:
Raise the performance bar. We see a strong correlation between office attendance vs performance and engagement.
Improve collaboration. Having meetings in person is more effective than video calls.
Improve relationships in and between teams. Interacting with people in person is better for solving conflict and building positive relations. Video calls are transactional, while having coffee or lunch together is infinitely better for relationship building.
Better information flow and idea generation. Having informal chats in the office is impossible to replicate remotely.
Improve mental wellbeing. Having positive in person interactions is a huge benefit for stress.
As managers I ask you to help me with this:
Sell this message to your teams.
Lead by example by being present in the office more often starting from next week.
Create an environment where your teams want to come into the office. It should be engaging and fun to work in person, not a chore.
Monitor and manage poor attendance. We are absolutely fine if some people decide this is not for them, as the cultural impact far outweighs it.
The culture at Bolt is unique and we need to work every day to retain it. I cannot do that alone – we all have to take accountability for making this a fantastic place to work, where people come to do the best work of their lives.
