Cushman & Wakefield- Sponsor of the Pulse Blog

Is the Return to the Office a Lost Cause?

Sep 21, 2022

Tesla is struggling with CEO Elon Musk’s mandate for workers to return to the office, according to CNBC, and they’re not the only one. 

As managers push for a return to the office, employees are balking. 

A big reason business leaders have continued to beat the return-to-office drum, despite continued pushback, is simply because working in an office, five days a week, nine-to-five (or seven-to-seven) is what made them successful in the first place, according to Fortune

“Yet many business leaders don’t want to acknowledge the pain,” the article says. “We’ve been dealing with more than a year of the “we need to get people back in offices” craze, but office building occupancy has been stagnant through much of this summer, stuck at around 43%, according to Kastle Systems, a security company that tracks patterns in employee key-card entry systems. And while much has been made of the seriousness with which companies are taking return-to-office policies post–Labor Day this year, there’s been virtually no change as employees continue to ignore the mandates.”

And still bosses won’t let it go:“The Los Angeles Times reported recently that 85% of bosses say they want employees to spend half or all of their time working in the office. “

“They don’t know any other way,” says Brian David Johnson, an author and professor of practice at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society. “You don’t go tell Steph Curry, ‘You should really stop shooting threes.’” 

David Harrison