By Michael Elkins
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO, Elon Musk enacted a strict return-to-office policy back in June, informing employees suddenly by email that they would need to “spend a minimum of forty hours in the office per week.” Anything else, he suggested, was “phoning it in.”
When asked about the email, Musk made it clear he had zero tolerance for workers’ demands to continue working from home full time, saying: “They should pretend to work somewhere else.”
Musk has continued to insist that Tesla workers be present in the office full-time and has doubled down on the company-wide mandate by monitoring who turns up to work every week.
However, CNBC reported on Thursday that three months into the company’s return-to-office mandate, Tesla is struggling with problems including overcrowding, shortages of office supplies, and low employee morale. According to several current employees, Tesla recently wanted to bring its personnel in the San Francisco Bay Area to the office for 3 days per week, but a shortage of chairs, desk space, parking spots and other resources proved too much.
In early June, right after Musk mandated 40 hours on site for all, Tesla made steep cuts to its headcount. Employees who were previously designated as remote workers but who could not relocate to be in the office 40 hours a week were given until September 30 to move or take a severance package from Tesla.
A week later, some of those who said they were not sure if they could relocate, or who said they could not move, were dismissed in June without warning, according to internal correspondence read by CNBC and two people directly familiar with the terminations. Some workers who lived far from a Tesla office are now living hours away from their families to meet the new requirements
The policy has also depleted some of Tesla’s power to recruit and retain top talent, with a few employees quitting because they wanted more flexibility.