Read the memo Dell sent ordering its sales staff back to the office 5 days a week

• Dell is mandating all global sales workers return to the office five days a week from Monday.
• The tech giant said it would help the sales staffers harness a "high energy" environment.

Dell has issued a return-to-office mandate calling for all of its sales workers to work from the office five days a week.

The tech giant sent a memo to its entire global sales team on Thursday, requiring them to be in the office all week from Monday.

Bill Scannell, Dell's president of global sales and customer operations, and John Byrne, its president of sales, global regions, and Dell Tech Select, announced the new policy in an internal email, seen by Business Insider.

"The expectation is that ALL Global Sales team members who can work from a Dell office be onsite five days a week, regardless of role," they wrote in the memo.

In February, Dell told workers who opted in for hybrid work that three days on-site a week was sufficient.

The company also began monitoring their attendance by tracking badge swipes and categorizing workers with color-coded flags.

But workers told BI that Dell's vision of in-office work wasn't panning out as planned. Over half the company had opted to stay remote, meaning many offices were empty. Others had multiple team members in different time zones, so were still communicating over Zoom.

"I do the same thing that I would at home, talk to the same people who are in a different office, and then I spend an hour in traffic coming home," one employee in the sales division told BI.

Scannell and Byrne said this week's move would help it to harness an environment of "high energy" and help staffers to grow their skills.

The memo also said, "As we enter a new AI world, in-person human interaction will be more important than ever."

The policy follows a major restructuring of the sales division announced in August as part of what leaders termed its "modernization journey."

Dell streamlined sales teams, introduced new AI-enabled processes, and carried out some of the largest layoffs in the company's recent history.

At the time, Vivek Mohindra, SVP of Corporate Strategy at Dell, told BI that the hybrid approach was "an important way of working."

"The hybrid approach allows us to not only be able to bring people in the room and have those conversations and move much faster, but also at the right times, be able to use the remote aspects of their work to be able to execute those," Mohindra said.

The new policy follows Amazon's announcement earlier this month that it will end its remote working arrangements, with CEO Andy Jassy telling employees to be in the office five days a week from January.

Dell did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI, made outside normal working hours.

Read the full memo below:

Are you a worker at Dell or another company pushing staff back to the office? Contact the reporter Polly Thompson in confidence at pthompson@businessinsider.com