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According to a survey from Resume Builder of over 1,000 decision-makers, 90% of companies plan to urge employees back to the office by the end of 2024. Almost 30% of these leaders say they will threaten to terminate employees who don’t oblige with the new return-to-office plans. These sentiments couldn’t be more at odds with the preferences of employees. In a Bankrate survey of 2,000 workers, roughly 68% of full-time employees prefer a hybrid work schedule. Ultimately, I believe the real reason leaders are trying to force workers to return to the office is not because they actually believe it...

Canada's largest pension fund sold a stake in a New York building for $1. Crashing office values have led investors to turn cautious on the sector. Office buildings have suffered from the pandemic's work-from-home boom. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the biggest pension in Canada, has completed a string of recent deals at discounted prices, including a sale of its stake in a New York building for $1, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.Commercial real estate concerns have escalated thanks to the pandemic's work-from-home boom and high interest rates in the wake of the Federal Reserve's inflation fight, and the gravest fears...

IBM Consulting this week told its US-based executives and people managers that, effective immediately, they must work from a corporate office at least three days per week, or face the consequences.John Granger, SVP of IBM Consulting, told staff in an email this is a company-wide policy that extends beyond the Consulting division. He issued a similar, if less emphatic, memo in 2022 that called for being in the workplace three days per week, "wherever possible," and exempted those designated as "work-at-home" employees from the office or client-site attendance.The email sent this week, however, tells those affected that they should "separate...

LGBTQ dating app Grindr ended its remote work policies and forced employees to relocate. Nearly half of its staff left. In early August, Grindr announced a return-to-office mandate. The policy gave workers two weeks to choose between relocating to their respective team’s newly assigned “hub” city to work in-person twice a week or leave the company with severance, according to the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Approximately 80 of Grindr’s 178 workers were forced to leave as of August 31, the CWA said Wednesday. Many of these workers were hired remotely and were required to relocate to new “hub” cities...

The return to in-office work has not gone well. As detailed by Entrepreneur, companies that have forced workers back into the office are currently facing a litany of issues ranging from employee dissatisfaction to difficulty hiring. “Unispace finds that nearly half (42%) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated,” writes author Gleb Tsipursky. “And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment.” For the companies who are considering returning to the office, the outlook isn’t great. “According to the same Greenhouse report, a staggering 76%...

The District is still stuck in a pandemic funk. Most days, the city, especially the core downtown blocks around the White House, looks more like a ghost town than a vibrant capital city. Before the coronavirus shutdown, visitors to Washington were often in awe of how many cranes punctuated the skyline. Now, it’s hard to find a building without a “for rent” sign. Coffee shops and restaurants are serving limited hours, if they’re open at all. Hopes were high for a revival this fall. Schools reopened. Covid cases were way down. Businesses were calling their employees back. But the city...

As FOX 5's Tom Fitzgerald found out, it seems a lot of people who work from home say they have no plans to go back to the office anytime soon. A new survey from The Pew Research Center shows surprisingly that a core group of American workers aren't returning to the office. The survey cites research that says on a national level, people are working remotely about 39% of the time as of April. That’s compared to around after 62% in mid-2020 at the height of pandemic. Locally, D.C. residents said they worked from home 42% of the time, while...

NEW YORK — It was February, the Omicron surge was abating and Mayor Eric Adams was telling New Yorkers, “The best thing we can do to deal with Covid is get back to work.” But the city’s public advocate, a fellow Democrat who’s running for governor, offered a different prescription for managing the pandemic and reviving the local economy. “As Covid-19 cases thankfully drop across New York,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said, “the way forward is to forge a new normal, in line with the science and with the needs of New Yorkers, with an eye toward the future for...

A group of Apple employees have accused the big-tech giant of racism over its push for corporate workers to return to the office, saying that the shift back to an in-person model will make the company 'younger, whiter, [and] more male-dominated.' The employees, organized under the newly-formed group Apple Together, petitioned the company on Friday in an open letter after CEO Tim Cook told staffers that they would need to work from the office one day a week starting on April 11, two days per week after three weeks, and three days per week after May 23. They wrote that...

“I don’t give a single f--k about ever coming back to work here,” a self-described Apple employee posted on a message board called Blind. Once April 11 comes around and brings this new rule into effect, they added, they will be resigning from their job. This worker was not alone, the New York Post was first to report on the message board, citing anonymous messages from other employees. ‘I already know I won’t be able to deal with the commute’ Apple’s plan is to introduce a hybrid schedule, adding days in office after April 11, enforcing two in-office days weekly...

I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it's like from the inside right now.

A Japanese brokerage firm has banned its staff from smoking, even while working from home. Nomura, the country's biggest investment bank, has asked its local staff to give up smoking during the working day in a move labelled as 'intrusive'. More than half of the company's staff in Japan are currently working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. Nomura announced the move in an internal memo on Tuesday, saying in a statement the following day that the new policy - introduced without plans for monitoring or punishment for rule breakers - will improve employee health and the workplace environment....

After 15 months of tumbleweeds blowing through near-abandoned commercial and financial centres, major North American cities are poised for a gradual downtown renaissance. The traffic that once flowed into downtowns by foot, bike, train, tram, and car and then up, up, up into the embrace of commercial office towers like arterial blood to the heart has already started to return.In parallel, a debate rages about whether white-collar workers, who have proven they can work remotely, ought to return to the office at all. Should companies expect a return to the pre-COVID default of five days per week office “presenteeism”? Will...

As we approach the final days of 2020 and many of us across the country are now hunkering down to stay warm amid cooler temperatures, I thought we’d take a look this week at sourcing activity for something a little different – cozy clothing. Sourcing for sweatshirts, sweatpants, and sweatsuits on the Thomasnet.com platform is up 379% year-over-year and has grown 230% over last quarter averages. In a relatedly comfortable category, searches for pajamas are up 162% year-over-year and up 90% over Q3 figures. The growing interest in these clothing options doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. In 2018, the...

Employees, which include over 9,000 in San Francisco, were previously allowed to work remotely until the end of 2020. Salesforce joins other tech giants like Facebook, Google and Uber, which all extended working from home until the end of June as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. The company occupies three towers in San Francisco’s Transbay district, including the city’s tallest building, Salesforce Tower. Downtown merchants worry that the prolonged absence of office workers will cripple the local economy, and many stores and restaurants in the area remain shut. Salesforce will offer an additional $250 for office supplies to each worker,...

I moved from Seattle to a "hobby farm" in rural Kentucky nine years ago. Two years ago, my daughter and her husband followed me here and bought a spectacular home east of Louisville for around $600k that would have cost millions in King county, WA. They were able to come here because his job allowed him to Work From Home (WFH) full time - and still earn Seattle wages. I've said for years that once technology allowed the concept of WFH to reach critical mass, we'd be seeing our cities drain into the burbs and rural areas of the nation....

Family in Malaysia tapes child to the floor so dad can WFH in peace Kids are a bundle of joy. Until you've got an important Zoom meeting with your boss' boss and they just can't seem to sit still, that is. Which is why this family quite literally, taped their young daughter down. In a series of photos shared on Facebook, a mess of toys and an overturned chair can be seen scattered across the room, a young girl lies in the middle of it all, held down by clear adhesive tape with a pillow to cushion her head. Meanwhile,...