Derek Tompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argues in this latest newsletter post that the 5-days a week as we know is slowly dying. As many businesses are slowly following a hybrid work-home model, this might create fascinating implications for work, cities and geography of labor, writes Derek.
I talk to hundreds of companies about remote work, and 95 percent of them now say they’re going hybrid, while the other 5 percent are going full remote. The number of person-days in the office is never going back to pre-pandemic average, ever.
– Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University (source: The Atlantic)
Bloom told Derek “Office occupancy has plummeted, but corporate demand for office space is down only about 1 percent. That might sound shocking, but it’s because so many companies planning for hybrid work are expecting most of the office to be in on some days of the week, so they can’t shrink their space.”
Long-Term Shift in Office Work
- The five-day workweek is dying. “This model, with Friday through Monday out of office, is hugely attractive to new hires, and it’s become a key weapon for companies. It’s not that everybody gets a four-day weekend, but rather it gives them flexibility to travel on Fridays and Mondays, while continuing to work,” Bloom told Derek.
- The age of hybrid work is going to be a beautiful mess. “The one great advantage of the office is that it meets our tremendous desire for human contact. If people are going to come back to the office multiple days a week, the office will have to adapt. Successful new offices will be like vertical yachts, an experience that people seek out, with terraces, and outdoor areas, and fancy gyms, and places to eat,” Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, told Drek.
- Cities are already starting to freak out. “It is important for offices to reopen and for white-collar workers to start commuting again. Remote work might be good for the individual, but we are in a very dark place if the only people who use transit are the people who actually have to show up to work in person, and the only places that make employees show up in person are the places that employ physical labor. That’s not a city I want to live in,” Sarah Feinberg, who served as interim president of the New York City Transit Authority until 2021, told Drek
Source: The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying | The Atlantic
Derek thinks that because rents very high in big cities like New York, and public transit prices are rising in most cities. “The point is not that these things are all good or all bad but precisely that they are complicated. Americans really, really don’t want to go back to the office, and we are just beginning to feel the repercussions.”