Delayed again: Still no return to the office
“A new wave of Covid uncertainty has again put millions of U.S. workers in limbo about when—or if—they need to return to the office,” said Jeff Green in Bloomberg.com. With the Omicron variant starting to spread in the United States, Uber, Ford, and Google all shelved earlier plans to bring workers back to their desks in January. In many cases, the postponements echoed the postponements this fall after the Delta variant spoiled return-to-office plans in September. But this “latest bout of Covid whiplash means that many white-collar Americans will be approaching two full years of remote work.” Firms are still formulating a strategy for how to get people back, but by next year it may be too late. There is a growing sense among some employers that all this time leaving workers in limbo might have cost them “the right to demand in-person attendance.”
“The very earliest, sort-of-exciting days of working from home seem unimaginably long ago now,” said Imogen West-Knights in The Guardian. But here we go again. “As soon as we are allowed to poke our heads above ground, we get unceremoniously thumped back inside” by another Covid wave. The difference this time is that it has been accompanied by “a dull realization that this may just be how we live now.” Some people are surely happy about it, some are not. “But almost everyone this time around” is resigned to the “inevitability of it.”
Even those companies that did return to offices this fall found the new reality complicated, said Jennifer Maloney in The Wall Street Journal. The beer giant Molson Coors started bringing corporate employees back three days a week in October after 18 months working remotely. Molson supplied “welcome packs with hand sanitizer” and “color-coded wristbands to help colleagues signal their openness to a hug.” But many employees still ended up “conducting meetings by videoconference at their desks, where they can remove their masks, rather than gathering in conference rooms.”
All this uncertainty has inspired an army of “RTO” (return to office) consultants who “have swarmed in with their inevitable fresh angles and robust solutions,” said Matthew Boyle in Bloomberg Businessweek. From blue-chip management consultants and their “PowerPoint wizardry” to interior designers promoting “Zoom-friendly furniture,” the latter stage of the pandemic has become “the greatest thing to happen to the consulting racket since Y2K.” But how long can “the RTO–industrial complex” thrive? That “will depend largely on whether the gurus can successfully pivot from prosaic advice on ventilation and Zoom etiquette to the more complex issue of the ever-evolving ‘workplace’ and how to manage the shifting demands that come with it.”