NEW YORK • A growing number of employers in the United States are delaying return-to-office dates once again, to the summer of 2021 at the earliest, with the coronavirus still surging in some parts of the country.
Google was one of the first to announce that July 2021 was its return-to-office date. Uber, Slack and Airbnb soon jumped on the bandwagon.
In the past week, Microsoft, Target, Ford Motor and The New York Times said they, too, had postponed the return of in-person work to next summer and acknowledged the inevitable: The pandemic is not going away anytime soon.
"Let's just bite the bullet," said Ms Joan Burke, the chief people officer of DocuSign in San Francisco. In August, her company, which manages electronic document signatures, decided it would allow its 5,200 employees to work from home until June 2021.
Many more companies are expected to delay their return-to-office dates to keep workers safe.
And workers said they were in no rush to go back, with 73 per cent of US employees fearing that being in their workplace could pose a risk to their personal health and safety, according to a study by Wakefield Research commissioned by Envoy, a workplace technology company.
More companies are also saying that they will institute permanent work-from-home policies so employees do not ever have to come into the office again.
In May, Facebook was one of the first to announce that it would allow many employees to work remotely even after the pandemic. Twitter, Coinbase and Shopify have also said they would do so. On Friday, Microsoft announced it would also be part of that shift.
With the new dates announced, Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley, who studies remote work, said people can finally start adjusting from a temporary "grin and bear it" approach to a permanent shift. Successful companies "have begun to think about long-term strategy rather than 'Let's just survive our crisis,'" she said.
Much of corporate America is now following the lead of Silicon Valley tech companies. Facebook has set the tone in planning for permanent remote work, while Google established the July 2021 target date for returning to the office.
"I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months," Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai wrote in an -email to employees about the July 2021 date.
Ms Burke said, however, people may miss the social interaction of an office space. Zoom "is not the same thing, and it's exhausting", she said.
Other companies that have delayed their returns to the office until next summer often face a more complicated decision because their workforces are not just made up of white-collar engineers, unlike those of Internet companies.
Ford said last week that its decision to hold off on back in-person office work through June next year would apply to its roughly 32,000 employees in North America who are already working remotely. The company, which has about 188,000 employees, said the policy does not apply to factory staff.
A push to all-company remote work can also be particularly difficult for companies with predominantly young workforces, said Mr Andy Eichfeld, chief human resources and administrative officer at credit card company Discover, which told employees on Sept 29 they would not need to return to the office before next June.
"A younger person needs apprenticeship in the first 10 or 15 years of their career," he said. "And we know how to deliver that in person. I'm not sure apprenticeship happens remotely."
NYTIMES
