Disappointed with the speed of the vaccine rollout, companies across America have canceled plans to recall employees to their offices this spring.
Many businesses have rescheduled the returns for September or later or are refusing to set any date at all for regrouping.
Qurate Retail has pushed back a May return date until September for workers in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and other cities; TechnologyAdvisors had set 1 February as its workers’ date to re-office, rescheduled the date to August, and now says it will wait until fall and then let employees choose whether to continue to work at home.
Fidelity Investments and United Parcel Service have told workers the companies are monitoring the nation’s progress in curbing the virus and will call employees back “when it is safe,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Eighty to 85 percent of the population should be vaccinated before Buoy Health in Massachusetts calls back-office workers, physician and CEO Andrew Le said to the Journal.
Le expects that to happen by fall “but that might be the optimistic CEO mindset,” he said.
Working at home has boosted productivity for many employees but stifled the creativity born of collaboration, executives told the Journal, and workers increasingly show signs of burnout.
Forty-four percent of workers do not know their companies’ plans to re-open offices, up from 37 percent in September, a survey of 2,200 office workers by the Conference Board has found.
Other polls have shown that workers still worry about prolonged in-person contact that offices enforce.
The highest office occupancy rates now are in cities where large school districts have brought students back to classrooms, such as Austin, Dallas, and Houston, a city where offices are seeing about 35 percent occupancy, data from card-swipe company Kastle Systems shows.
Austin’s HealthCare2U has brought back half its office staff, which still allows social distancing at desks and in conference rooms, CEO Andrew Bonner noted.
In contrast, in New York City, where students are in classrooms only part-time, about 15 percent of workers are at their desks.
TREND FORECAST: What has been lost is lost. As we have been forecasting, major cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc., will not recover for years. Never before have people left major cities in such large numbers to escape the virus, rising crime, and sky-high living costs and moved to suburbs, ex-burbs, and other cities.
The trend to move to sunbelt, low tax, and less government-regulated cities will both rebound and grow as living conditions in the once thriving, but now hard locked-down metropolises continue to deteriorate. Along with crime, taxes will rise, and it will be a long road down before these once-thriving hot spots that were rich with tourists, commercial businesses, entertainment, and high-quality return to life.
