The head of the company that runs WebMD and several other online outlets is taking heat for a video that made fun of remote work and hinted at consequences for employees who continued to stay at home.
Bob Brisco, the CEO of Internet Brands, is responsible for various health, legal and automotive companies, including WebMD.
The executive was front-facing in a video that was meant for workers but has been shared in public by the company.
He spent much of its two minutes poking fun at people who continued to stay home from the California-based company after the pandemic.
Remote work has become a hot button issue since the pandemic, as California is a top ten state in terms of percentage of workers performing from home.
Bob Brisco, the CEO of Internet Brands, is taking heat for a video that made fun of remote work and hinted at consequences for employees who continued to stay at home
Brisco even added that his company was considering becoming ‘more serious’ about stopping it going forward.
‘We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point. We’re informing,’ Brisco said of the ‘unfortunately, too big of a group’ of employees who still work from home.
He spends most of the clip slamming any employees who continue to refuse to come into the office.
At one point, you can see a white-collar remote worker answering the phone while wearing boxers.
The man is alone in a Google hangout because, as the video says: ‘Everyone is in person now!’
The video plays a song called ‘Iko Iko’ throughout and shows people dancing to the lyrics.
You can see an interpretation of the lyrics meant to criticize remote workers: ‘We mean business’ and ‘don’t mess with us.’
‘We need you ready and present and we need it now,’ WebMD’s CFO said at one point.
Brisco, the CEO of Internet Brands, is responsible for various health, legal and automotive companies, including WebMD
The executive was front-facing in a video that was meant for workers but has been shared in public by the company
‘We have been slow in getting back with some people and in some places. That’s about to change.’
Critics of the video on the anonymous forums Blind compared it to the acting by ‘hostages in ‘direct-to-DVD movies.’
The video was posted to the forum with the headline ‘Bad acting, lies and gaslighting in god awful RTO video.’
DailyMail.com has reached out to a spokesperson for Internet Brands for comment.
Despite the significant decline in working remotely from 2021 to 2022, it still remained almost three times higher than before the pandemic in 2019, when it was only 5.7 percent and more than three-quarters of workers drove alone to work in a vehicle.
Data from the 2022 American Community Survey released on Thursday shows that, nationwide, 15.2 percent of employees worked remotely last year (stock image)
New Census data has been released showing the states where remote work remains the most popular, as many employers demand a return to the office
The 2022 survey did not let participants say whether they work from home full-time or only some of the time, and respondents could pick multiple answers.
The data show that the rate of people commuting to work alone in a vehicle climbed to 68.7 percent in 2022 from 67.8 percent in 2021.
For carpoolers, it rose to 8.6 percent from 7.8 percent the prior year.
Public transportation usage rose to 3.1 percent from 2.5 percent year-over-year, and the time people spent traveling to work jumped almost a full minute to 26.4 minutes in 2022, compared to 25.6 minutes in 2021.