If there’s one thing businesses have learned from the corona plague, it’s trying to stop predicting when they will return to the office. Companies across the United States have announced they will return to work from the office in September, then postponed plans with the Delta strain spreading. Many of these companies were preparing to clear the struggle from office desks in January. Now central banks, technology companies and other companies have rejected these plans because of the Omicron strain, and the feeling that the plague will last longer than first imagined.
The postponements have put pressure on office owners and small business owners who are suffering from declining demand in office areas. On average, only 28% of the workforce returned to the office last week in ten major cities, according to Kastle Systems, a security company that operates across the U.S. that monitors arrivals and departures. This is compared to more than 40% in the first week of December. From announcing return dates.
Instead, they adopt different strategies that recognize that the plague remains in the environment for the foreseeable future. These programs, which are still being worked on by many companies, mean adapting to using offices according to need and the state of morbidity. For example, instead of committing to a specific date of return to the office, companies will decide on a certain number of employees who come to the office depending on the morbidity situation, say HR experts.
Some companies are also working on strategies that will base the return to the office on the needs of specific groups. In such a system, managers will be able to ask the employees who work in sales or marketing to come to the office for cooperation, and then return to work mainly at home after the process is completed.
Giving up a return statement to the office is bad news for property owners because the change will extend the length of time people work from home. “The longer people work at home, the harder it will be to get them back to work,” said Katherine Wilde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City Business Lobby.
Some companies updated their work strategies even before the Omicron hit in November. In the fall, the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP informed employees that they would be notified three weeks before the firms reopened, and did not announce a pre-determined date. “Our flexible and adaptive approach serves us well,” a ministry spokesman said last week.
Brian Krupp, human resources manager at research and consulting firm Gartner, says he sees evidence of this new approach in hundreds of conversations his company conducts each week with executives around the world. “We no longer speak in terms of, ‘there is a virus or there is no virus,'” he says. “They are changing their mindset and saying, ‘We are going to create a system of conditions and they will determine how many people can return to the office at any given moment.'”
About a third of companies that responded to Gartner’s study in late December said they were sending employees home, delaying office opening, or reducing the number of office workers.
Building expectations can hurt employee morale and company reputation even though managers have no way of predicting the course of the epidemic, Krupp says. Companies that continue to change their minds “do not want to continue to make promises and not be able to keep them.”
Even the big banks, which were the most aggressive in the line of returning employees to the office, sent everyone home until after the holidays. Goldman Sachs, which reopened its offices in June, after the Christmas and New Year holidays encouraged employees to stay home until at least January 18th. Wells Fargo, which postponed its return to offices from September to October, planned to reopen the offices last week, but canceled. In December, the company announced that it would update on the new plans.