Across the US, signs of the pandemic era are fading. Movie theaters are full again; planes and airports are packed with people; restaurants are seating patrons inside, maskless.
As far as global health officials are concerned, the Covid pandemic is over. But that doesn't mean we can snap our fingers and suddenly make Corporate America 2019 again.
Here's the deal: Bosses — even the Cool Mom types who have prided themselves on being chill about attendance — are getting impatient as productivity broadly declines.
Google, a company that markets its cloud computing products as vital tools for the modern hybrid workplace, on Wednesday told its staff they have to be in the office three days a week. Failure to do so could show up on their performance reviews, according to a memo seen by the Washington Post.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is also pushing a three-day in-office plan. Ditto Amazon and Apple. Earlier this year, Disney rolled out a four-day-a-week in-person mandate.
Similar moves are happening in scattershot fashion across Corporate America, and there's one thing that unites them: It's not going great.
Even as the industries hit hardest by the pandemic bounce back to their fighting weight, office occupancy remains stubbornly around 50% of 2019 levels.
No one, it seems, has cracked the code on the Great Return to Office. (Sorry to break it to all of you bosses out there, but no amount of group yoga sessions or free donuts is going to get me to come in on a Friday in the year 2023.)
At the same time, the Great Return to Restaurants/Hotels/Concerts/Sporting Events/Life Outside Our Homes is in full swing.
The problem with the office — and the thing many managers can't seem to understand — is that office life in the Before Times really sucked.
And I mean, really, really sucked. We were all a bunch of proverbial frogs slowly boiling to death until the pandemic came along and knocked us all out of the corporate soup and into our natural habitats where — surprise! — we all enjoyed an extra hour or two spent not commuting in gridlock or ironing hard pants all so we can adhere to an arbitrary five-day, 40-hour-a-week schedule.
While it's true that productivity is falling sharply lately, there's little evidence suggesting remote work is the primary culprit. In fact, many economists suspect the drop in employee engagement is because of burnout — everyone went unsustainably hard in 2020 and 2021, when work was, well, pretty much all we had.
BOTTOM LINE: If companies want to rebuild a more in-person collaborative environment, beanbag chairs and snacks aren't gonna cut it.
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