Raytheon Technologies is leveraging the hybrid work model to reduce its footprint and foster a more inclusive workforce, CEO Greg Hayes told CNBC on Tuesday.
After working from home for more than a year, an experiment sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the company plans to cut a quarter of its office space and only welcome employees to the office when needed.
“What this pandemic has honestly shown us is that you can be productive in different work environments,” he said in an interview with Jim Cramer about Mad Money.
Around 100,000 people worked remotely during the pandemic, according to Raytheon, who employed 181,000 people worldwide as of December. Raytheon intends to reduce its 32 million square feet by 25%, or 8 million square feet.
That doesn’t mean the end of personal work at Raytheon, an aerospace and defense giant based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Hayes sees worker involvement as an opportunity to maintain the corporate culture, but saw an advantage in eliminating daily trips to campus.
“I still think you have to be in the office occasionally,” he said. “You have to build up social capital, you have to build this team esprit de corps, but you don’t have to commute an hour every day to be productive.”
Raytheon is also focused on achieving diversity goals, and Hayes believes that a model for working from anywhere will be the key to the work-life balance that many women demand.
During the pandemic, women’s participation in the labor force fell to levels not seen in decades.
“We’re going to give people flexibility, and that’s going to be very helpful in terms of customer loyalty as well,” said Haye. “When I think about the goals we have about diversity that are trying to keep young women in the workforce, that kind of flexibility is absolutely necessary.”
Raytheon stock fell 1.37% on Tuesday to close at $ 85.38. The stock is up 19% this year.
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