“I’m trying to fill office buildings and I’m telling JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, I’m telling them all, ‘Listen, I need your people back in the office so we can build the ecosystem,'” New York Mayor Eric Adams said this week. . The city, which relies heavily on tax revenues from massive Midtown offices, recently announced a strict privacy policy for city employees.
“What does it look like to have city officials at home while I tell everyone else it’s time to go back to work?” Mr Adams added. “City officials must take responsibility for saying, ‘New York can come back.'”
“Fake story we told each other”
Beyond the end result, the debate in the office is about what kind of culture will prevail when the business world emerges from the pandemic. And despite all the power that Mr. Musk, Mr. Dimon, and Mr. Adams have, they can fight change that is greater than any single company or city.
If more than two years of experimenting with remote work in a pandemic has taught us something, it is that many people can be productive outside the office, and are much happier when they do. This is especially true for people with young children or long trips to work, minority workers who find it more difficult to fit into the standard office culture, or those with other personal circumstances that make office work less. attractive.
“We are still struggling to break the stereotype of the ideal worker – even though this man, for many people, professions and demographics in the United States, never existed,” said Colleen Amerman, director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School. “I think with telecommuting and hybrid 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 high-profile, and to get out of being associated with being in the office. anytime.”
Even when the pandemic changes course, there are signs that the trend of working from home is actually accelerating. A recent study 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, up from 1.5 days in the summer of 2020.
It’s not just the office – it’s the trip to work. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that almost all major cities with the biggest drop in office occupancy during the pandemic had an average one-way trip of more than 30 minutes; and most cities with the smallest declines had shorter trips.
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