Office occupancy across the country plateaued last month at around 43 percent as Covid cases spiked again, according to data from Kastle, a security firm. When asked in early 2021 about the share of their workers who would be back in the office five days a week in the future, executives said 50 percent now that percentage is down to 20, according to a recent survey from the consulting firm Gartner.

Optimism about return-to-office plans, across industries and cities, is slowly abating. But the second we started going, we realized how silly it was,” he added. “As much as we grumbled about going back to work, we all understood that it was going to happen. In other words, his team realized that there was no all-powerful being forcing their attendance there was only a man behind a curtain ( or Zoom screen). Kime, it marked a new phase in their return-to-office conversations. Other employees then jumped in to share the reasons they didn’t want to go back to the office: child care, rising gas prices, Covid-19 rates. “I was talking about how it was insane to ask people to come in more often with Covid raging,” he recalled.

Kime, a senior creative director, took himself off mute. Could members of his team at NBCUniversal show up on the few days a week that they were actually expected to be in the office? What Barrett Kime’s boss said on the recent video call was straightforward. which has required workers to be at the office since last June. A full lot at the artificial intelligence company C3 AI.

Life on the line by emma goldberg