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The dramatic jump in COVID-19 cases and the emergence of the Omicron variant has forced companies to rethink their approach to bringing employees back into the office, with several large companies announcing a shift in strategies.
The Trends Journal has reported extensively on how the COVID-19 has forever changed what it means to work from home and landlords should be afraid. (See: “REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY UPDATE,” “CORPORATIONS CONTINUE TO SHED OFFICE SPACE,” and “OFFICE WORKERS’ SLOW RETURN ENDANGERS LANDLORDS, CITY FINANCES.”)
The trend has even sped up the innovation that will soon render offices nearly obsolete. (See: “SPOTLIGHT: METAVERSE,” and “METAVERSE: THE NEW COLLECTIVE.”
Lyft, Ford Motor, Uber Technologies, and Alphabet’s Google have all delayed plans of a return to the office due to variant fears, The Wall Street Journal reported. The paper reported that the reduction of employees returning to work would be “painful for office-building landlords who have struggled with high vacancy and uncertainty over the long-term impact of the pandemic.”
Kastle Systems, the security company that tracks access-card swipes at office buildings in the 10 largest cities in the U.S., reported that about 41 percent of the workforce have returned to their desks, the WSJ reported.
James Gorman, the CEO of Morgan Stanley, said in an interview that he was wrong to tell employees that they should get back into the office.
“I thought we would have been out of it past Labor Day, and we’re not,” he told CNBC.
He said he believes the world will be dealing with the pandemic “through most of next year.”
“Everybody’s still finding their way and then you get the Omicron variant; who knows, we’ll have pi, we’ll have theta, and epsilon, and we’ll eventually run out of letters of the alphabet. It’s continuing to be an issue,” he said.
Jefferies, the investment bank, told its nearly 5,000 employees to work from home and Goldman Sachs told its bankers to hold off on any more holiday parties. The New York Times reported that Citigroup had its employees returning to the office twice a week since September, but has since told them that they could work remotely.
Apple Inc. also took steps to limit the spread of the virus by delaying the return to the office and closing three stores due to outbreaks.
The Journal, citing a person familiar with the announcement, reported that there is now no clear date for a return. Tim Cook, the CEO, had said that employees would be able to return in some kind of a hybrid approach in February.
Analysts predict that another hiatus from the office would cause “more employers to consider remote work longer term,” the paper said. There is hope among landlords and restaurants in major cities that any drawback will not be as severe as it was in the early days of the outbreak due to the prevalence of vaccines.
The U.S. is averaging more than 120,000 new coronavirus cases each day, which represents a 40 percent jump from earlier this month, The New York Times reported.
News also broke out last week that Google plans to fire any employee who does not adhere to the company’s vaccination policy. CNBC received an internal memo among executives that said if these unvaccinated workers don’t take the jab by 18 January, they will be placed on paid administrative leave for two months followed by unpaid personal leave for up to six months, and then be terminated.
The Washington Post also told its employees that it plans to bring workers back to the office by mid-February and they are expected to have taken a booster and should prepare for weekly testing.
“What we’ve been seeing from our customers is uncertainty: Do we mandate boosters, do we not mandate boosters?” Benjamin Granger, an organizational psychologist at the software company Qualtrics, told The Times. “When we see the first domino fall, I think we’ll see a cascade of them coming.”
TREND FORECAST: We had forecast this trend last year when the media and politicians launched the COVID War. The two factors: remote working and that people leaving expensive, large urban centers for suburban and exurban locations are unprecedented and would not have been possible prior to the advances of 21st-century technology.
Thus, there will be a steady decline in overbuilt urban areas. Despite moves to change zoning laws to turn empty commercial buildings into residential ones, it will not replenish the loss of rental income from commercial tenants and economic loss for retail, restaurant, tourism, and hospitality businesses that thriving commercial cities generated.
As we have detailed in this and previous Trends Journals, the Wall Street Mob and the Bankster Gang have been more eager to get their employees back at their desks since they hold massive amounts of commercial real estate debt and huge real estate holdings.
From Skype to Zoom, the work-from-home trend persists even as lockdowns and other COVID War protocols begin to fade into the past.
Even a complete “return to normalcy” may not manifest in office workers flocking back to their cubicles, and the high rate of unused, unoccupied and unneeded office space is taking a toll, and creating shake-ups, in the commercial real estate market.
We went into detail on this in our article of 5 January 2021, “TRENDS IN REAL ESTATE,” as well as in numerous other real estate articles in the Trends Journal.