“Google decided that work-life balance, going home early and working from home were more important than winning,” Schmidt said in the recording. “And the reason the startups work is because people work like crazy.”

Anyone who later starts a company will “not let people work from home and only come to work one day a week if they want to compete with the other startups,” Schmidt suspects.

The former Google boss now appears to be retracting his claims. In an email to the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt said he had “let slip about Google and their working hours.”

“I regret my mistake,” he told the Journal.

Schmidt did not elaborate. A spokesman for Schmidt did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But the former Google CEO struck a tone that many tech CEOs have already said about remote work – even if the research on the topic is not exactly conclusive.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune Magazine in 2023 that he believed allowing employees to work “completely remotely forever” was one of the tech industry’s “worst mistakes.”

“I would say the experiment in this regard is over and the technology is not yet good enough to let people work completely remotely forever, especially at startups,” he told the magazine.

OpenAI, on the other hand, continues to implement a mix of hybrid and remote policies.

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the company requires its on-site employees to come into the office three days a week and that it also employs some remote workers.

According to a company blog, Google has a similar policy that requires most employees to come to work at least three days a week.

A Google spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, once described himself as a notorious telecommuter and also believed that some employees need to be in the office.

“You have to combine in-person and remote work,” Benioff said. “Our engineers are extremely productive at home. We have a lot of people who are extremely productive at home. But you also have to have sales people who are productive in the office.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, stated that “people working from home are not efficient and engineers coming into the office get more work done.” He cited internal company performance data to support his position.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk called remote work in 2023 “morally wrong” in an interview with CNBC.

But research on the impact of remote work on productivity is mixed. Some studies showed an increase in productivity, while others found a negative impact. A Goldman Sachs analysis found that the discrepancy may be due to the way productivity is measured, as BI previously reported.

A research paper The study examined 20 million scientific papers and 4 million patent applications, but found that face-to-face collaboration promotes innovation, reported Aki Ito of BI.

“I wouldn’t say that all companies should go back to working entirely on-site,” Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist at the University of Oxford and co-author of the study, told BI. “But if you just look at it from the perspective of developing breakthrough technologies, you should probably work on-site as much as possible.”