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The 3-Day Return to Office Is, So Far, a Dud

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The 3-Day Return to Office Is, So Far, a Dud

New York Magazine,

5 min read
3 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

People don’t want to return to the office for a mandated three days a week – they want their flexibility.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Eye Opening
  • Eloquent

Recommendation

In late May 2022, Apple rescinded its three-day-a-week back-to-work schedule, supposedly because COVID-19 cases were rising again. The real reason wasn’t about public health, as Kim Velsey reports in New York Magazine. The company made the shift because its employees didn’t want to return to the office. Many other companies’ return-to-work plans also did not come to fruition, mostly because their employees had grown accustomed to more flexible schedules and learned they could work effectively from home. A standard “hybrid” model in which employees decide which days they will come to the office has proven difficult to carry out and its long-term viability is by no means clear.

Summary

Many employees are balking at mandatory, three-day return-to-work schedules.

In late May 2022, Apple set a mandatory three-day-a-week return-to-work schedule for its employees. It canceled that plan, however, and shifted to two days a week, putatively due to rising COVID-19 infections. But many suspect that is not the real reason for the cancellation: At that time the coronavirus wasn’t preventing people from going to restaurants or theaters. The simple truth was that people didn’t want to return to the rigid office work schedules that were the norm for decades prior to the pandemic.

People liked the flexibility they gained by working at home, and they accepted that COVID-19 wasn’t going to wholly disappear. In New York at that point, only 8% of employees had returned...

About the Author

Kim Velsey is a staff reporter for New York Magazine.

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