“I’m trying to fill office buildings and I’m telling JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, all of them, ‘Listen, I need your people back in charge so we can build the ecosystem,'” Mayor Eric said. Adams of New York City said this week. The city, which is heavily dependent on the tax revenues of the massive Midtown offices, recently announced a strict face-to-face work policy for city employees.
“How does it look like city employees are home while I tell everyone else it’s time to go back to work?” added Mr. Adams. “City employees should lead the task of saying, ‘New York can come back.’
“A false story we’ve been telling each other”
Beyond the end result, the debate back in the office is about what kind of culture will prevail as the business world emerges from the pandemic. And for all the power that Mr. Musk, Mr. Dimon and Mr. Adams, they may be struggling with a change that is bigger than any business or city.
If there’s one thing the more than two years of remote pandemic work experimentation have taught us, it’s that many people can be productive out of the office, and many are happier to do so. This is especially true for people with young children or long commutes, minority workers who have more difficulty adjusting to the standard office culture, or those with other personal circumstances that make office work less attractive. .
“We’re still struggling to break the ideal stereotype of the worker, even though that person, for many people and occupations and demographic groups in the U.S., never existed,” said Colleen Ammerman, director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard. . Business school. “I think with remote and hybrid work, we have the potential to really get away from that and really rethink what it means to be on a leadership track, what it means to be high performing and get away from being associated with being in the office at all hours “.
Although the pandemic has changed direction, there are indications that the trend of working from home is accelerating. A recent survey published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that employers now say they will allow employees to work from home an average of 2.3 days a week, compared to 1.5 days in the summer of 2020.
It’s not just the office, it’s also the commute. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that almost every major city with the largest declines in office occupancy during the pandemic had an average commute of more than 30 minutes; and most cities with smaller descents had shorter commutes.