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IBM was a pioneer in the work-from-home revolution — now it's cracking down

Tech giant IBM has decided to ditch its work-from-home policy and move thousands of employees to a new "co-located" setup.

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After several decades of allowing employees to perform their jobs remotely, IBM has announced that starting this week it is giving employees the choice of moving to in-person offices or finding a new gig, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Some 2,600 people in IBM's marketing department, plus an unknown number of employees in IT, procurement, and Watson-related departments, learned in early February they would soon be required to work — or "co-locate" — in one of six US cities.

Those include Atlanta, Austin, Boston, New York, Raleigh, and San Francisco. If employees chose not to move to their designated city, they would be free to look for a new job.

IBM's decision to bring more people from digital workspaces into physical ones bucks a longstanding trend at the company of giving employees latitude in where they get their work done. Between 1995 and 2009, the company shrank its footprint by 78 million square feet — at a savings of more than $100 million. The company has also seen 20 consecutive quarters of falling revenue.

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Other companies soon followed suit: Work-from-home became a desirable perk of many white-collar jobs. Now one out of every four American workers telecommutes with some regularity. Data indicate roughly 80 to 90% of people who don't currently telecommute would like to start.

A spokesperson for IBM says the company decided to require in-office work for its marketing teams in batches (as opposed to the other departments, which either started as co-located or gradually moved in that direction) because of the field's modern demands.

"Marketing is no longer a 'waterfall' work process, where work is handed from one person to another," the spokesperson told Business Insider. "It is an iterative process, where the effects of changes in a campaign can be understood live, and responded to in real-time."

Employees heard a similar message from IBM's chief marketing officer, Michelle Peluso, in a video she distributed through the company's intranet.

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