REMOTE WORK: THE NEW BOTTOM LINE

Thirty-five percent of white-collar workers would refuse to even consider a job that forbids them to work at home at least some of the time, a recent poll by Rippling, a human resources software firm, found.
Only one worker in 15 expects to return to the office full-time, the poll discovered.
However, a plurality prefer a hybrid model: 39 percent want to be in the office some of the time, while only 24 percent want to work at home all the time.
Remote work has its challenges, respondents admitted; 71 percent find it more difficult than spending all day every workday at the office. 
Forty-eight percent find it harder to communicate with colleagues, 44 percent say it is more challenging to have their contributions recognized, and 44 percent find it difficult to strike a satisfying work-life balance.
However, 54 percent enjoy being able to take more frequent breaks, 51 percent appreciate being able to spend more time with family, and half like remote work’s casual dress and more comfortable seating choices.
Half of tech workers favor the hybrid structure, while 54 percent of employees in arts and entertainment organizations want to spend all their work time in the office.
“For the foreseeable future, companies will need to find ways to support a distributed workforce, but it’s still a heavy lift for many organizations,” Christine Maxwell, Rippling’s vice-president of human resources, said in a statement announcing the survey’s results. 
“This survey makes clear that companies need to adapt and find modern solutions to support their workforce,” she added.
TREND FORECAST: This survey adds additional evidence to support our prediction that remote work is here to stay, as we signaled in “Remote Work Becomes Tech Sector’s New Normal” (1 Dec 2020) and “HSBC Endorses Remote Work Model, Slashes Travel Budget” (14 Sep 2021). 
With more people working from home, we maintain our forecast for a long trend of a weakening commercial real estate sector. Confirming what we had forecast over a year ago, a 2021 Fitch Ratings study calculated that if companies surrender 10 percent of their office space as workers remain at home permanently, the value of office buildings could plummet as much as 40 percent.
Owners of commercial real estate will face a reckoning as they slash rents to lure a shrinking base of tenants, forcing them to demand property tax concessions from cities that will struggle even more to maintain police, fire, and public works infrastructures.
Although more people are returning to city centers to live, as we report in in this issue, in “USA: CAN’T AFFORD TO BUY A HOME, CAN’T PAY THE RENT”, that will not be enough to fully restore the commercial ecosystem of restaurants, shops, and entertainment venues that grew up to serve a full complement of daily commuters.
As a result, downtown commercial centers in traditional office hubs such as New York City and San Francisco will not return to their pre-COVID size or vitality. We have detailed this trend in articles such as “Retail Chains Abandon Manhattan” (18 Aug 2020) and “Manhattan’s Commercial Real Estate Crash” (21 Sep 2021).
To replace the empty office spaces, commercial buildings will be refitted as condos and apartments.