Postponing a Return to Office Gets Companies Nowhere
Covid’s delta wave has employers deciding to extend work-from-home arrangements again because of all the uncertainties. So why pick January for a return?
Back to the office is becoming an endless cycle of false starts.
Source: Bloomberg
The planned autumn 2021 return to the office is being delayed. Until January, purportedly. That’s when Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google, Microsoft Corp. and some other major employers of knowledge workers now say they expect people back at their desks, 22 months after sending everybody home at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Given the current high U.S. levels of Covid cases, hospitalizations and in some places deaths, it’s understandable that companies don’t want to do a big return-to-office right now. Less clear is why they all thought early fall would be such a great time for RTO in the first place, or why they think the coast will be so much clearer in January.