Zoom CEO thinks Zoom sucks at building trust, audio leak reveals

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Earlier this month, Zoom announced a surprising move requiring some of its employees to return to the office, where they were supposed to work more efficiently. Today, leaked audio from an internal Zoom meeting shared with Business Insider revealed that Zoom CEO Eric Yuan called employees back to the office because he felt "remote work was not allowing people to establish as much trust or to be as innovative". /p>

None of this seems to fit the Zoom brand, which provides video conferencing technology that the company says enables “immersive collaboration in the office, right from home.”

Yuan's comments came during a company meeting on Aug. 3, where he told employees that the main reason for the back-to-office mandate was to build more trust between employees.

"Over the past few years, we've hired so many new 'Zoomies' that it's very difficult to build trust," Yuan said, describing a situation that many companies who continued to hire during the pandemic can probably find relevant. In 2022, Yuan told Stanford Business School that the number of Zoom employees had tripled during the pandemic, from 2,000 to 6,000.

But Zoom is supposed to be the product that builds trust and relationships with remote employees. Its homepage claims that Zoom helps teams become "more connected, more collaborative, smarter" and "do more".

On a page promoting Zoom's Meetings feature, the company said that 95% of "customers who switch to Zoom report an increase" in performance and trust between team members. Now it appears that Yuan has revealed that Zoom, as a company, has found that promise has not been kept.

“Trust is the foundation of everything,” Yuan said. "Without trust, we will be slow."

Another reason Yuan wanted to bring employees back together in the office was to spur innovation that he says results from more lively conversations and debates that just don't happen as often on Zoom. Yuan said that on the contrary, to the apparent detriment of the company's ability to generate new ideas, "everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call."

To address what Yuan described as a less desirable work environment for his team, Zoom is requiring employees who live within 80 miles of an office to show up in person at least two days a week. Any employees who are reluctant to agree to the policy can request an exception, Insider reported.

For Zoom employees who cling to remote work, there may be reason to hope that Yuan will be friendly. In 2022, Yuan told students at Stanford Business School that after many of his engineers joined him to work late nights to keep Zoom running as popularity peaked during the pandemic, his "n °1 is making sure Zoom employees are happy.” p>

But Yuan has big ideas for the future of Zoom, and it seems he's calling on everyone to step up to help him reimagine what video conferencing looks like and develop what he calls Zoom 2.0 over the next five years.

“From our perspective, we really believe in the future. From a technology perspective, Zoom can provide a much better experience,” Yuan said at Stanford. "You and I can sit at home. I can sit anywhere. Let's say at the local Starbucks coffee shop. I shake your hand. You feel my hand shaking. I hug you and you feel my intimacy. And even if we speak a different language, we can understand each other. And have a cup of coffee, enjoy the smell from a distance. All these technologies will be part of our offer in the future."

Perhaps this futuristic version of Zoom would be better than the current version at building trust with remote workers? We'll see if Yuan brings his Zoom teams back to the office to enable new levels of creativity as Yuan strives to increase his income during a difficult year, where