“I’m trying to fill office buildings, and I’m saying to JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, I’m saying to all of them, ‘Listen, I need your people back in the office so we can build them. building ecosystems’, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said this week. The city, which relies heavily on tax revenue from its large Midtown offices, recently announced a strict policy on door-to-door employment for city employees.
“How do city workers stay home while I’m telling everyone it’s time to get back to work?” Mr. Adams added. “The city’s employees should lead the charge saying, ‘New York can come back. “
‘A fake story we’re telling ourselves’
Beyond the bottom line, the debate at the office is about what kind of culture will prevail as the business world emerges from the pandemic. And for all the power Mr. Musk, Mr. Dimon and Mr. Adams hold, they may be fighting a change greater than any company or city.
If the pandemic’s two-plus years of remote work testing has taught us anything, it’s much people can be productive outside the office, and pretty much everyone is happier doing so. That is especially true for people with young children or long commuteminority workers have a harder time adapting to standard office cultures, or those with other personal circumstances that make working in an office less appealing.
“We are still struggling to get rid of the ideal worker stereotype – even though that person is, for many people, occupation and demographic group,” said Colleen Ammerman, Director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard. in the United States, never really existed,” said Colleen Ammerman, director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School. “I think with hybrid and remote work, we have the potential to really move away from that and really rethink what it means to be a leader, what it means to be a leader. get high performance and get away with that. with being at the office all the time. “
Even as the pandemic has changed, there are signs that the work-from-home trend is actually accelerating. One recent survey published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that employers are now saying they will allow employees to work from home an average of 2.3 days per week, up from 1.5 days in summer 2020.
It’s not just an office – it’s also a commute. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that virtually all major cities with the largest drop in office occupancy during the pandemic have an average one-way commute time of more than 30 minutes; and most cities with the smallest reductions had shorter commutes.
