Dell has become the latest company to backtrack on its remote work promises, telling employees to be in the office at least three days a week.

During the pandemic, Dell went all-in on remote work, saying many of its staff would work remotely forever.

“After all of this investment to enable remote everything, we will never go back to the way things were before,” COO Jeff Clarke said at the time via The Register. “Here at Dell, we expect, on an ongoing basis, that 60 per cent of our workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week.”

Fast-forward less than three years later, and the company is singing a decidedly different tune, telling workers they would need to come into the office at least three days a week. Employees were notified via an internal memo from Clarke and seen by The Register. The memo acknowledges the challenges of making the switch, especially after the past promise, and allows for flexibility in implementing the back-to-office mandate.

“We know many of us have arranged our lives around remote work over the past three years,” said Clarke. “This is not a light switch transition. We understand it will take time to prepare and adjust to being in the office more regularly again. This is the beginning of us more clearly defining hybrid work for our company.”

With many companies bracing for a possible recession, remote work has increasingly become a casualty as managers and executives try to tighten operations and exert as much control as possible.

Whatever the motivations, they are little consolation to people who were promised one thing and are now facing a very different reality.