While it seems to be a practice for large companies of the first world, it all comes down, and the implications for the work, and the cities are going to be fascinating according to recent data published in The Atlantic.

The world is returning slowly to normal. The stadiums are packed. The trips have been recovered. The reservations of restaurants are on the rise.

But even when they resume their leisure activities as normal, many employees are still without returning to the office. According to the data of Kastle Systems, which tracks access to buildings in the world, the attendance to the office is only 33% percent of the average pre-pandemic. This is lower than the in-person assistance in almost any other industry for which we have good data. Even the cinema, a business that is sometimes dismissed as "damned", have been recovered almost to double.

What once seemed an outlet hot is becoming a reality cold as the stone: for tens of millions of workers in the knowledge economy, the office will never return completely. The implications for the work, the cities and the geography of work, will be fascinating.

In the last few months, I've noticed that the companies technology, media, and finance have basically stopped talking about their comprehensive plans back to the office. And I'm not the only one. “We talked with hundreds of companies on the remote work, and 95% of them now says they are going hybrid, while the other 5% is becoming fully remote,” said Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University. The exceptions to the rule, as Goldman Sachs, are scarce.

“The amount of person-days in the office will never return to the average pre-pandemic, never”, I said Bloom. After two years of working from home, he said, the workers do not only prefer that. They also feel that they are improving on that. Despite widespread reports of exhaustion, productivity, self-reported has increased steadily in the last year, according to their research.

In the next decade, workers spend about 25% of their time working from home, says Bloom. That is 20 percentage points higher than the previous figure to the pandemic, leaving companies with an important choice: to sign for a lot less office space or accept that a large part of its space will be unused on a particular day.

Bloom strong bet for the second. “The occupation of offices has collapsed, but the demand for corporate space has been reduced by only about 1 per cent,” he said. “That may sound dramatic, but it is because many companies that plan to a work-in hybrid expected that the greater part of the office is open on certain days of the week, so that they can't reduce their space.”

Not all cities are faced with the same level of abandonment of office. Occupancy rates in Houston, Austin and Dallas have overcome substantial and constant to the coastal cities like New York and San Francisco. A plausible explanation is that the remote work is held in part by the caution of COVID, and the cities of the south have an attitude that is more laissez-faire attitude toward the pandemic

I must emphasize that the majority of americans still can't and don't work remotely. But I have come to see the revolution of the working distance as well as something similar to a cannonball thrown into a lake, a phenomenon acute whose waves may deform all corners of the labor force. Let's take a look at the three primary implications of this long-term change in the office.

1. The five-day work week is dying

I know that sounds like a prediction dramatic. But follow the bread crumbs.

According to the research of Bloom, the most popular model of work-in hybrid has employees in the office from Tuesday to Thursday. “This model, with absence from Friday to Monday, it is highly attractive to new hires and has become a weapon at the heart of business,” he said. “It is not for everyone to have a weekend of four days, but gives them the flexibility to travel on Friday and Monday, as they continue to work”.

For some knowledge workers, from Friday to Monday, may occupy a space murky between the day of the week and the weekend, a kind of purgatory of work and fun, where the walls that once were strong between work and life become more porous. “Monday and Tuesday are the days of fastest-growing of the week for travel”, said the ceo of Airbnb, Brian Chesky. “More people are trying to weekends and regular long weekends holiday”. In summary, the work week is typical of five days can be dissolved into something more bizarre and least settled: one working week to three days in a work week longer.

But that is not all. Bloom told me that it is also looking for signs of envy for the remote work of people who can't do their job from home. “There is resentment between workers who do not have this comfortable, I try to work from home, but all of his friends white collar, he said. “I have spoken with hospitals whose shift workers would prefer to work more hours for four days a few hours the five”.

Amount: three days in the office to workers, media and technology; four days in person for the hospital staff, and the five-day work week appears to be in danger. Bloom suggested that schools might respond to these changes by providing teachers with a Monday or Friday-free, which could be the nail in the coffin of the work week-fashioned.

This is all a bit speculative, and I can already see how these changes will be concluded by some (¡Friday of summer forever!) and problematic for others (wait, What do I do if my child's school cancels classes Friday for always?). But the general prediction is plausible: if the five-day work week is just for knowledge workers, the consequences could touch all corners of the labor market.

2. The era of work-in hybrid is going to be a beautiful disaster

When the Internet burst onto the physical stores, the response of many retail was: to make the shopping experience. Now the Internet has disrupted the physical office and the response of the businesses may be similar: to make the office a pleasant experience.

“The one great advantage of the office is to satisfy our tremendous desire for human contact,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of politics and urban planning at the University of New York. If people are going to get back to the office several days a week, said Moss, the office will have to adapt. “The new offices of successful will be as yachts vertical,” he said, “an experience that people are looking for, with terraces, outdoor areas, gyms, elegant and places to eat.”

But "take a walk" in the office, even if such a thing is widely as possible, it will not be enough. The preferences back to the office are everywhere, and any single policy is going to annoy a lot of people. According to the data of the survey of Bloom, more than 20% of those surveyed in the world would prefer to work from home "rarely or never", while more than 30% say they would prefer to stay at home throughout the working week. However, the hybrid solution more popular for employers (three days in the office for all) is the preference of only 14 per cent of the workers.

When the office was the core of the administrative work, there were problems. When the office ceases to be the core of the work, there will still be problems, just different.

Many young college graduates to begin careers in business remote without physical meetings of routine may lose the social bond that comes from being in an office. “My feeling from the anecdotal evidence is that young workers are concerned about the lack of such connections,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “The difficulties to form connections with peers and mentors generates a feeling of drift for many new employees, which leads them to be more open to change jobs”. When the office is a place, there is a physical connection with the colleagues. When the office turns into a group chat marked by meetings in Zoom, change of work is almost as easy as logging on to an account of Slack and sign in to another.

Many employers will have difficulty making the transition to work-in hybrid. If you push too much for workers to come to the office, some people just iran to preserve its independence. If employers fail to build any kind of corporate culture is tangible, many workers do not feel a sense of real community among their colleagues, they will change jobs more often. And whatever you do to the employers, in an era of job offers record, many workers will work anyway. The decline of the office is going to be difficult for many companies, no matter what.

3. The cities are already starting to go crazy

If the occupation of the offices they will never recover, the areas of the center will experience an ice age for a long time. Offices empty will mean less lunch at the restaurants in the center, the less happy hours, less glass, less travel on the subway and bus, and less work for the services of cleaning, security and maintenance. This means economies of the centre weaker and less taxable income to the cities.For this reason, some of the advocates more open to the return to the office in these days are not executive directors, but politicians and state officials. “Business leaders, tell them to all come back,” said the governor of New York Kathy Hochul, earlier this month. “Give them a bonus to burn the application Zoom”. The mayor of the city of New York, Eric Adams, echoed those comments. “The city of New York can't run away from home,” he said. “It's time to get back to work”.In both Boston and San Francisco, the number of passengers of the metro could be reduced permanently. That means that it is possible that the transit authorities never recover from their peaks prior to the pandemic, and that areas in the centre of the city never recover the pedestrian traffic lost from buyers during the week. Sarah Feinberg, who served as interim president of the Transit Authority of the City of New York until 2021, told me by email that is concerned not only for the finances of the authority of transit but also by the soul of the city.

“It is important that the offices re-open, and that the administrative workers begin to travel again,” said Feinberg. The remote work can be "good for the individual", she added, but "we're in a very dark place if the only people who use public transportation are the people who actually have to go to work in person, and the unique places that make the employees are presented in person are places that employ physical work. This is not a city I want to live”.It is, however, a city in which many people want to live. The residential neighborhoods are bustling during the week, while Wednesday will feel like on Sundays. Some offices will be transformed into apartments, alleviating the housing crisis, while public transport will feel pressured to increase the prices of the tickets, punishing sadly the labor force face-to-face low-income. The point is not that these things are all good or all bad, but that are complicated. The workers don't really want to go back to the office, and we are only just beginning to feel the impact.

Source: https://www.comunidad-rh.com/