The end of a return-to-office date – Kathimerini English Edition

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The executives had a good feeling about January 10, 2022 – the date when DocuSign’s 7,000 employees worldwide would finally come back to work.

This deadline wouldn’t be like that earlier one, May 2020, which was always a fantasy, or August 2020, which was a bit ambitious, or October 2021, a plan derailed by the delta variant. Fourth time’s the charm.

“Every time we delay this we’re pushing off the inevitable,” said Joan Burke, chief people officer, in an interview in late November. “At some point in time, DocuSign is going to be open.”

That some point in time is no longer in January. The omicron variant interjected. Just as companies from Ford Motor to Lyft have done in the past week, DocuSign postponed again. In place of a new date came the company’s promise to “reassess our plans as 2022 unfolds.”

“Employees understand the evolving nature of what we’re dealing with makes it impossible to predict,” Burke said this month. “I can’t even remember all the dates we’ve put out there, and I’m the one who put them out there.”

Return-to-office dates used to be like talismans; the CEOs who set them seemed to wield some power over the shape of the months to come. Then the dates were postponed, and postponed again. At some point, the spell was broken. For many companies, office-reopening plans have lost their fear factor, coming to seem like wishful thinking rather than a sign of futures filled with alarm clocks, commutes and pants that actually button. The RTO date is gone. It has been replaced with “We’ll get back to you.”

“The only companies being dishonest are the ones giving employees certainty,” said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who advises dozens of CEOs. “As a parent, you can hide stuff from your kids, but as a CEO, you can’t do that to adult employees who read the news.”

Some workers have returned to their cubicles in recent months, with office occupancy across the United States rising from 33% in August to 40% this month, according to data from Kastle Systems, a building security firm. But the visions of full-scale reopenings and mandatory returns, which formed as vaccines rolled out last spring, have remained nebulous.

A late-August survey of 238 executives, conducted by Gartner, found that two-thirds of organizations had delayed their return to office plans because of news about coronavirus variants. Apple, Ford, CNN and Google are just a handful of the employers that announced postponements, along with Lyft, which said the earliest that workers would be required to return to the office is 2023.

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Source: https://www.ekathimerini.com/nytimes/1173648/the-end-of-a-return-to-office-date/