Are we officially post-pandemic yet? No?
One thing we are past is everything we used to know and understand about corporate real estate and how people use the space their companies provide to them. If headlines are any indication, workers are not returning to offices as expected. Companies require a return (Apple x2, Goldman, Tesla) and they discover employees have more leverage than expected. Companies bribe a return (free lunch, dinner, commute reimbursement) and they are shocked when it is not about the money either.
But there is a secret these companies are not realizing. Their employees have come back! [Insert shocked face here because it’s a dramatic twist!]
What is most fascinating to me, after speaking to quite a range of companies, is that almost all employees who worked from an office before have come back in at this point. It is just that they are not coming in as they did before. The single biggest factor that has changed is occupancy across time.
Before the pandemic, those in real estate almost universally thought about occupancy as a weekly event. We measured our sites on a weekly basis with peaks and troughs Monday through Friday. Of course, we knew that people did not come in consistently every week, but the majority did. Their patterns were predictable enough that weekly trends were valid and consistent. In our new world, occupancy varies both across Monday to Friday and across weeks. This means that the majority are not coming in a day or more a week, they are coming in a day or more every other, third, or fourth week.
It may not sound like an epiphany, but this small change throws off every measure and metric that has existed for real estate. Using old metrics, it seems as if our employees are no longer coming into the office. But looking broader over time, they are just coming in less often. This makes perfect sense as a change when looked at for almost everything else we do in life. Many obligations are not every week. And let’s be honest, most people have learned that going to an office is an important obligation, not something that makes or breaks their success.
So, while things have changed (and the numbers imply dramatically), they are not quite as different as they may appear on the surface.