The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying

Subject: The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying Mon Feb 28, 2022 6:52 pm

And the implications for work and cities are going to be fascinating.

The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying Original

America is slowly returning to normal. Stadiums are packed. Travel has bounced back. Restaurant reservations are surging.

But even as they resume normal leisure activities, many Americans still aren’t going back to the office. According to data from Kastle Systems, which tracks building access across the country, office attendance is at just 33 percent of its pre-pandemic average. That’s lower than in-person attendance in just about any other industry for which we have good data. Even movie theaters—a business sometimes written off as “doomed”—have recovered almost twice as much.

What once seemed like a hot take is becoming a stone-cold reality: For tens of millions of knowledge-economy workers, the office is never coming all the way back. The implications—for work, cities, and the geography of labor—will be fascinating.

In the past few months, I’ve noticed that tech, media, and finance companies have basically stopped talking about their full return-to-office plans. And I’m not the only one. “I talk to hundreds of companies about remote work, and 95 percent of them now say they’re going hybrid, while the other 5 percent are going full remote,” Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, told me. The exceptions to the rule, such as Goldman Sachs, are scarce.

“The number of person-days in the office is never going back to pre-pandemic average, ever,” Bloom told me. After two years of working from home, he said, employees don’t just prefer it. They also feel like they’re getting better at it. Despite widespread reports of burnout, self-reported productivity has increased steadily in the past year, according to his research.

In the next decade, U.S. workers will spend about 25 percent of their time working from home, Bloom says. That’s 20 percentage points higher than the pre-pandemic figure, leaving companies with an important choice: sign for significantly less office space, or accept that significantly more of your space will go unused on a given day.

Bloom is betting strongly on the latter. “Office occupancy has plummeted, but corporate demand for office space is down only about 1 percent,” he said. “That might sound shocking, but it’s because so many companies planning for hybrid work are expecting most of the office to be in on some days of the week, so they can’t shrink their space.”

.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/work-from-home-revolution/622880/

The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying

The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying

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