Is it time for US to get ‘back to work’ in office?

For nearly two years, pandemic-weary Americans have been pleading for one thing: We want our lives back. And in many ways, we now have our lives back — just not our work lives. Too many employees are still working from home. It’s reached the point where employers need to prioritise returning to the office, an argument President Joe Biden made emphatically in his State of the Union address: “It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again.”
Kastle Systems has been tracking America’s return to work since early in the Covid-19 pandemic to gauge where, or whether, people are going back into the office. By scouring key-card and mobile phone-access data in 10 key cities, we can see where office life is getting back to some semblance of normal (as in Texas) and where offices remain largely vacant (as in California). We can even see trends within industries: Law firms have meaningfully higher rates of occupancy than other sectors. The data represent a cross-section of American businesses, with no sector dominating our analyses.
What US has found — and this has been consistent for the past year — is that offices remain largely empty. Recently, the Back to Work Barometer showed that the average of the 10 cities, if analysed, had an office utilisation of just over 36.8% compared with pre-pandemic levels.
While many people are still worried about catching Covid-19, the fear of the virus is not to blame for empty offices. That’s because Americans are embracing many other aspects of their pre-pandemic lives — they’re going to airports, movie theaters, restaurants, schools and sporting venues.
In December, just as Omicron was beginning to sweep the country, Open Table reported that restaurant reservations in New York City were back to 100% of pre-pandemic levels, and about 99% of US schools had returned to in-person learning. TSA reported that domestic airline travel was approaching pre-pandemic levels and NFL and NBA attendance nearly matched 2019 numbers. Spider-Man had the second largest opening movie weekend in history. Music concerts, which were essentially shut down in 2020, began their robust comeback in 2021, and Pollstar, which collects and analyses music industry data, is projecting a record-setting year in 2022. New York City subway ridership has returned to about 60% of pre-pandemic levels, even as the city’s office occupancy was just over 30% of prior levels. Even Broadway sales have returned to about 80% of seating capacity. Omicron dented these numbers, but they’re already rebounding.

—Bloomberg