What Barrett Kime’s boss said on the recent video call was straightforward. Could members of his team at NBCUniversal show up on the few days a week that they were actually expected to be in the office?
Rebellion ensued. Mr. Kime, a senior creative director, took himself off mute. “I was talking about how it was insane to ask people to come in more often with Covid raging,” he recalled.
Other employees then jumped in to share the reasons they didn’t want to go back to the office: child care, rising gas prices, Covid-19 rates. To Mr. Kime, it marked a new phase in their return-to-office conversations.
“It’s kind of a Wizard of Oz thing,” Mr. Kime said. In other words, his team realized that there was no all-powerful being forcing their attendance; there was only a man behind a curtain (or Zoom screen). “As much as we grumbled about going back to work, we all understood that it was going to happen. But the second we started going, we realized how silly it was,” he added.
Optimism about return-to-office plans, across industries and cities, is slowly abating. When asked in early 2021 about the share of their workers who would be back in the office five days a week in the future, executives said 50 percent; now that percentage is down to 20, according to a recent survey from the consulting firm Gartner. Office occupancy across the country plateaued last month at around 43 percent as Covid cases spiked again, according to data from Kastle, a security firm.
The vast majority of Americans, particularly those in the service sector and low-wage jobs, have been working in person throughout the pandemic. But those who were able to work remotely got attached to the flexibility. In a January survey, the Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of workers whose jobs can be done at home wanted to work remotely most or all of the time.
“What is abundantly clear is that there are fewer and fewer companies expecting their employees to be in the office five days a week,” said Brian Kropp, vice president in Gartner’s human resources practice. “Even some of the major companies that came out and said ‘We want our employees in the office five days a week’ are starting to backtrack.”
There’s Apple, which recently suspended its requirement that employees return to the office at least three days a week. There’s McKinsey, which intends at some point to set clearer norms around office attendance, with the goal of ensuring that people get the value of in-person collaboration, but for now is allowing individuals to set agreements with their clients and managers, according to its head of human resources.
Google postponed its return to office planned for January, and by now roughly 10 percent of its employees have received permission to go fully remote or relocate. Intuit had at one point considered some kind of rigid return-to-office plan for its 11,500 U.S. employees but instead allowed managers and teams to set their own expectations of which days to go in.
“Being prescriptive creates all kind of bureaucracy, because then you have to get management layers involved and it just becomes very rule-based,” said Sasan Goodarzi, the chief executive of Intuit. “We don’t believe you have to be in the office 40 hours a week, and we also don’t believe you can be all virtual.”
R.T.O. plans have unfolded like a giant game of chicken. Executives told workers to come back to the office, then delayed their plans as Covid cases continued to spike. Business leaders accepted the uncertainty, hoping it was temporary. Until it was clear that it wasn’t. Workers got extra time at home, and extra leeway to test the rigidity of their bosses’ plans. Now some companies are expecting people back but have lost the leverage to enforce that because of the constant flux in deadlines.
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