Roughly half of U.S. employees shift back to the workplace
Tuesday has become the busiest day of the week for office occupancy, while everybody tends to disappear on Fridays.
For the first time since society began to reopen on the other side of pandemic shutdowns, the business consultancy Kastle has reported that 50% or more workers in the U.S. are no longer remote and have instead returned to the office.
Kastle reports a weekly return-to-office barometer from 10 major U.S. cities. As of the first week of February, the firm noted that average office occupancy levels reached 50% for more for the first time since it began tracking this metric during the pandemic.
Kastle’s survey is based on entry-card swipes. It averaged 50.4% in office occupancy levels for the last full week of January. In another post-pandemic first, all of the cities tracked in the survey achieved office occupancy averages of 40% or above, including the city with the most troubled office sector in the U.S., San Francisco, which jumped more than two percentage points to nearly 46%.
Austin, which has led the resurgence in office occupancies among Texas cities, approached 70% in the survey, and nearly 77% on the day during the survey week when it notched its highest occupancy level.
According to Kastle, which started to break out daily as well as weekly averages after hybrid work patterns were widely adopted, Tuesday has become the busiest day of the week for office occupancy levels, while everybody tends to disappear on Fridays.
Houston, Chicago and New York, which posted weekly averages of 60.3%, 50.6% and 47.5% in the late January survey, like Austin also surged on Tuesday, to 66%, 63.7% and 59.5%, respectively.
While it’s probably too early to declare a trend, the upward trend is an important milestone.
After creeping up to 43% in March 2022, the 10-city average stalled at that level for the next six months. After Labor Day, the 10-city average bounced up to 47%, but then plateaued at that level for the rest of the year.
But this new trend is a sign of hope for office-building owners and managers hoping to see more employees in person.
It’s been a busy month for hopeful business signs as evidence continues to mount that the fever of inflation has finally broken..
The White House also signaled recently that President Biden will declare an official end to the COVID-19 emergency in May, acknowledging the obvious: that with each new variant, the virus has gotten more infectious but less virulent.
Even better, the International Monetary Fund recently raised its growth outlook for the first time in a year, declaring a “turning point” for the global economy. IMF says the threat of a global recession is “diminishing.”
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