Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman announced again that employees should return to the office now and issued a new forecast for how long companies will delay their return.
“I was wrong about this,” he told CNBC’s Wilfred Frost Monday on “Closing Bells.” “I thought we would make it past Labor Day before and we don’t.”
In June, Gorman told conference attendees that he would be “Very disappointing“if his workers had not returned to the Morgan Stanley buildings by Labor Day. Those plans, which were widely reported in the press, were derailed in part by discovery. new omicron variant of Covid. Companies from Lyft arrive Ford has had to delay and reevaluate plans to return to the office in recent weeks.
“I think we’ll be in it for most of the next year,” Gorman said. “People are still finding their way and then you get the omicron variant; who knows we’ll have pi, we’ll have theta and epsilon and eventually we’ll run out of letters of the alphabet. It continues to be a problem.”
However, more than half of Morgan Stanley’s employees have returned to the bank’s New York headquarters, where the bank’s trading operations are located, Gorman said. About 65% of the vaccinated staff returned to that building, and 95% of the staff received the injection, he said.
