Since the beginning of the pandemic, corporate bosses have used Labor Day as a benchmark to call workers back to offices.
And in the last year, some of the companies who first sang the praises of remote work, like Google, Meta, Amazon and even Zoom, have cracked down on office attendance, in some cases tying it to performance evaluations.
New data shows that office attendance rates have, indeed, picked up since 2020, though even the latest annual autumn push shows the limits to how many more people may return.
As of the week of September 6 to 13, 2023, office badge swipes in the 10 biggest U.S. cities are at about 50% what they were prior to the pandemic, according to data from Kastle Systems.
That’s in line with numbers from earlier this year, the first time the U.S. hit an average of 50% attendance rates since the pandemic.
To be sure, that’s much better than the 25% occupancy rates in September 2020, or even the 34% attendance of 2021. But it’s also further evidence that momentum to get more people in offices has leveled off to the new 50% norm, experts say.
“The mandates didn’t stick,” says Caitlin Duffy, research director of employee experience at Gartner. With the exception of a few highly publicized announcements and strict enforcement from companies, she says, we haven’t seen a flurry of new businesses announcing new return requirements, or companies actually enforcing those guidelines.
‘There’s still not a ton of compliance’
As of May, roughly 42% businesses have a return-to-office mandate, according to a Gartner survey of 78 HR leaders, and 39% say they don’t have any consequences for not meeting attendance requirements.
“There’s still not a ton of compliance, and there’s still pushback from employees, so I wouldn’t say the tide has turned in terms of mandates becoming something employees are onboard with,” Duffy says.
Some leaders are even seeing their haphazard RTO plans with a lens of remorse: 80% of bosses regret their initial RTO decisions and would have done things differently if they better understood employee attendance and what they’d use the office for, according to recent research from Envoy.
It begs the question as another Labor Day return has come and gone: Is anyone taking new RTO announcements seriously?
“I would say largely no,” says Natalie Norfus, an HR and recruiting expert. She often hears executive clients who say the business can’t flourish if people aren’t in-person. “And [workers] are like, ‘Yet, some of us have had our best years’” while remote, she says.
“I’m certainly not saying there’s no value to being a person at all,” she adds. She thinks leaders aren’t thinking enough about what, exactly, workers have gained over the years — especially the time saved by not having to commute.
Source: CNBC
