Will employees return to the office in 2023?
Settlement with the return to the office is not yet complete.
Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that the week after Thanksgiving would be a slow time for the workplace as most employees try to relax things during the even slower march into the New Year. Therefore, at first glance, it is surprising to see that the office occupancy rate reached 49% in the week of December 5, according to Kastle Systems. That was one of the highest since the pandemic sent the majority of Americans home in March 2020.
And experts say that number is expected to continue rising – albeit slowly – as we enter 2023.
“It’s starting in spurts,” says Mark Ein, President of Kastle Systems. “[Office occupancy] has been steadily on the rise since the beginning [2022]. We’ve actually been talking about and forecasting this increase for quite some time.”
Kastle Systems has become something of a barometer for who’s gaining ground in the tug-of-war between employees and executives to get back into the office. The security firm, which tracks patterns in employee key card entry into offices, predicted at the start of 2022 that office occupancy rates would rise slightly steadily throughout the year. And that’s pretty much how it played out.
After falling to a low of 15% in April 2020, office occupancy started rising steadily in 2021 until the U.S. was hit by the Omicron wave. In the first week of January 2022, interest rates reached 28%. Despite many setbacks from employees and media coverage, things have mostly been up since then.
During the summer, interest rates rose into the 43-44% range, where they fluctuated until the autumn, peaking at 47% in September.
A tells wealth He believes that these interest rates will continue to rise consistently. The 49% occupancy rate, which seemed like an outlier since it was just after Thanksgiving, was an example more than anything of where the return to office debate is going in the New Year.
If you break it down by day, occupancy rates in the first full week of December hit nearly 57% on Tuesday — the most popular day to go to the office –, 56% on Wednesday, and 51% on Thursday. Monday and Friday are understandably less popular, with a utilization difference of more than 23% between the day with the highest percentage and the day with the lowest percentage.
One reason for the increase in office occupancy could be that many workers need to complete projects before the end of the year and prepare for 2023. That work, Ein argues, is easier to do in the office.
“It’s actually a pretty intense and critical time,” he says.
Still, Ein expects office occupancy rates to settle somewhere around 60%.
One of the things we have certainly learned over the past year is that work as we knew it before the pandemic is unlikely to return. Office workers have already settled into a new rhythm – at home.
“The step where we are now is people coming back [to the office]but they just focus that time on different days,” says Ein.
That will continue, he says: more people will flock to offices Tuesday through Thursday, fewer on Mondays and Fridays, likely keeping the average occupancy rate at or around 60%.
This assumes, of course, that nothing dramatically impacts RTO or the job market. If we haven’t learned anything in the past three years, it’s that we should never make assumptions.
“The same pressures that caused office occupancy to rise will continue into 2023…but there will be a natural ceiling,” Ein says. “We will never really reach 100%.”
On the other hand, he also doesn’t think we’ll see a significant drop in office occupancy unless another highly transmissible COVID-19 variant emerges. Additionally, he says, business leaders are looking at all other aspects of life where people congregate — sporting events, conferences, movie theaters, etc. — and they’ve all practically returned to normal. Of course, the fact that the office is lagging behind this trend could also indicate that the way we work has just changed forever.
Nevertheless, the steady passage of time seems to inevitably lead back to the office – about 60% of the time.
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