Returning to the office delayed until 2022

Last week, Uber executives huddled on a night-time video call to make a difficult decision. They considered whether the ride-hailing company should join a growing list of companies once again delaying their return-to-office dates. Soon after, they announced that Uber would fully reopen its offices on Jan. 10, postponed from Oct. 25. “I’ve been in H.R. for 30 years, and this is probably the hardest crisis I’ve had to deal with,” said Laura Faith, the senior director of people experience and operations at Uber. “This really is about life or death and health and safety.”

In the nearly 18 months since the pandemic first forced companies to send their employees to work from home, the date companies have planned to bring workers back to offices has changed again and again. First it was January, a full year after the coronavirus first surfaced in China. January slipped to July, as tens of millions of people lined up across America to be vaccinated. But then the surge of vaccinations peaked, and the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus drove another spike in cases. For many companies, September became the new July. Now September is out as an option, and it’s anybody’s guess when workers will return to their offices in large numbers.

Companies have new variables to consider, including mask mandates that have been dropped and ordered back; evidence that the effectiveness of vaccines, while still strong, may be waning; booster shots; and burned-out workers who are vaccinated at varying rates. There are also the differing infection rates across the country and a shifting power dynamic between employers and employees. In addition to Uber, companies including Google, Amazon, Apple and Starbucks have said they will postpone their return dates to next year. Executives say their rationale for the long delay is twofold: In addition to wanting to keep employees out of harm’s way, they are seeking an end to the roller coaster of anticipated return dates and further delays. The fits and starts make it difficult for employees to plan, and the hope is that a far-off return date will not need to be adjusted yet again.

“We wanted to make sure that we were giving employees a decision that gave them enough time to plan their lives,” Faith said. Pushing the date just one month later, for instance, “wasn’t giving them enough clarity.”

At Intel, executives recently scrapped a planned Sept. 1 return date for some sites in favour of an indefinite target. Many of the company’s more than 100,000 employees are working on-site at semiconductor fabrication plants around the world, but for office workers, the date by which employees will be asked to return now depends entirely on vaccination rates and case counts in their particular regions.

“How much certainty are you really giving people by throwing an arbitrary date out there?” said Todd Brady, Intel’s director of global public affairs. “If we say Oct. 1, who knows?”

Intel’s chief executive, Patrick Gelsinger, acknowledged in an interview that the new wave of Covid-19 cases had “definitely stretched things out.” The company has been relying on data to decide when to slowly phase employees back into offices, Brady said, but that does not make the process any easier. “It’s challenging for all of us,” he said. “We get our hopes up, we’re ready to return to our quote-unquote normal lives, and then we take a few steps back.” In a recent poll of 1,600 employers by the employment and labour law firm Littler, 40 percent of respondents said they had delayed plans to return more employees to in-person work. Half of respondents with more than 10,000 employees said the same.

Leading the charge of postponements are technology firms, which tend to have significant portions of employees who can do their jobs from home. In April, before Delta had become the dominant strain of the virus in the United States, Airbnb moved its date all the way to September 2022.

Postponing gives the workers who are responding to new requirements sufficient time to become fully vaccinated. And it gives companies more time to set up the logistics that accompany vaccination mandates, such as processes for tracking vaccination status and, soon, who has received a booster.