IBM CEO Arvind Krishna Cautions Staff On Remote Work; Highlights Impact On Career Growth

International Business Machines (IBM) Corp CEO Arvind Krishna recently said that remote work can be hazardous to employees’ career. In a word of caution to the company’s 260,000 staff, Krishna said he is not forcing any staffers to come into the office just yet, but those who don’t would be hard-pressed to get promoted, especially into managerial roles.

“Being a people manager when you’re remote is just tough because if you’re managing people, you need to be able to see them once in a while,” he said in an interview Monday in New York. “It doesn’t need to be every minute. You don’t need to function under those old ‘Everybody’s under my eye’ kind of rules, but at least sometimes,” Bloomberg quoted Krishna as saying.

He became the CEO right after the pandemic hit in April 2020.

Due to the rise of remote work, IBM’s hybrid-cloud computing business has seen a considerable growth.

The report added that Krishna said people make a choice to work remotely, but it need not be “a forever choice — it could be a choice based on convenience or circumstance.” Remote workers, he said, don’t learn how to do things like deal with a difficult client, or how to make trade-offs when designing a new product. “I don’t understand how to do all that remotely,” he added.

Krishna’s comments add to the growing debate over the merits of remote versus in-person work, with some CEOs arguing that workers — particularly younger staff — need to be on site more often than not for learning and mentorship opportunities, while other experts point to research showing that workers are happier and even more productive when they have the opportunity to work from home. Office-based staff, though, spend 25% more time in career-development activities than their remote counterparts, the Bloomberg report added.

Moreover, the tech giant also expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years, news agency Reuters reported.

Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.

His comment comes at a time when AI has caught the imagination of people around the world after the launch of Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT, in November last year.

The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.

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