Working In Sweatpants May Be Over As Companies Contemplate The Great Office Return

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/07/ [login to see] /working-in-sweatpants-may-be-over-as-companies-contemplate-the-great-office-retu
On a walk outside his office in downtown Washington, D.C., Greg Meyer stops to peer in through the glass windows of a fast-casual lunch spot called Leon. The exposed brick interior gives it a cozy coffeehouse vibe. But the lunch crowd is nowhere to be seen. The whole place is dark.

"The pandemic put them out of business," says Meyer, region head for Brookfield Properties, which owns almost all the buildings on this block and hundreds more around the country.

Now with vaccines available on demand and infection rates falling, Meyer believes businesses have a civic duty to bring workers back.

"It's time now," he says. "We've got to do everything we can do get people back as quickly as possible."

Fifteen months into the pandemic, Brookfield's office buildings in Washington, D.C., are only at about 14% occupancy, down from 80% in normal times. Companies that ordered their employees to work from home in March 2020 are only now starting to bring them back into the office. Some are waiting until fall to bring back workers in significant numbers, while others have no plans to return to pre-pandemic work arrangements at all.