Anyone else's employers maintaining nearly empty workplaces?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In the years since covid, we’ve had a few threads about returning to the office (RTO).

I work in a government office. For the most part, everyone is almost entirely work-at-home. A very few people have to report to the office once a week or once a month. I could work at home nearly 100%, but since I live only 6 minutes away, I go in for parts of 2 days per week to do one specific aspect of my job. (It requires phone calls/meetings, which I do not wish my wife to have to overhear at home.)

Our office used to house 60 or so fulltime employees. Today, in addition to myself, there were 3 employees and a security guard. I realized, not only that it was weird having so few people in such a sizeable space, but that it was weird that working in such a ghost town has almost become normal. As I understand it, there is such a glut of office space in our area, the the landlord happily extended our lease for 10 more years, at a rate that was likely less than any costs of closing/moving/consolidating with another office. :roll_eyes:

Anyone else similarly reporting to work in a ghost town? Or other aspects of your RTO you wish to comment on?

2

Our firm has three offices. The “main” one is in Seattle and although the largest, is hardly used. We decided to sublet half to save expenses, which is great. (the subtenants barely use it either).

Our other offices are used a bit more, but probably 40% of pre-covid occupancy on most days.

3

I work out of a $3.5 billion development that was built to provide government offices. It was designed to house large parts of the state government in a series of 30+ story buildings. Hot desking was required because the office would house so many people. It opened a few weeks before covid hit and was then mostly empty for years. Earlier this year we were directed to be in the office 3 days a week. My team goes in on Monday and Friday and has a “floating” day, which floats away entirely and doesn’t exist. On the days that we do go in our floor is perhaps 10% occupied. I sit at the same two desks every week. On the rare occasion that I have gone in on another day of the week it is much busier though but nothing like full.

4

I’m thinking that at this point, it would seem quite odd to work in a workplace that was anywhere near capacity. As I near retirement (2 more years!) it is almost hard to recall what the first 35 years were like, and how drastically it changed 5 years ago.

5

Since the pandemic my company has embraced remote working and sold one of their 4-building campuses then leased back half the space, and another campus they have not renewed the lease on one of the 2 buildings there, giving up about half the space at that site. Other locations are similarly trimmed by not renewing full leases or giving up floor space in high-rises. Still, when I rarely go to either of the local offices they are deserted ghost towns - sad as I recall a vibrant work community with a great company cafe, gym, and seasonal company-sponsored activities. All of that is in the rear view now. It’s a shame the amount of energy being consumed to keep these empty cubicle farms lit and climate controlled.

My son works for a company with a local office and they are required to be there 4 days a week, altho he usually leaves there by mid-afternoon along with everyone else. This arrangement seems to be the exception these days.

6

Our office wanted to go back to 3 in-office days per week, but there aren’t enough desks for that (after they downsized during the pandemic) so we do 2 or 3 days on alternating weeks. I come in on Mondays and the office is definitely less than half full then.

7

We got rid of our office last spring and went fully virtual.

My wife was supposed to go back 4 days a week, but due to limited space she’s officially remote but still goes into the office once or twice a week where she inevitably finds the office half empty.

8

Our office is fully occupied. No difference from 2019.

9

I work for county government as a social worker and there have been no changes at all.

10

Our policy is 3 days in, 2 WFH. At our Chicago office I would guess most people come in twice a week. Similar at the Brazil offices. I think people come in every day at the China offices.

We have some sublet tenants in Chicago (from before the pandemic). Some of them look to be completely WFH now.

11

Our policy is “work wherever you want.” Some employees are asking for more in office contact with their colleagues. Some who live farther away are opposed.

12

Frequently.

At my last job, I’d get in early and walk into a empty enormous space with 100 desks (I counted). Each desk was a motorized up-and-down desk you could sit at or stand at. Each had a good chair, a set of drawers, and TWO computer monitors. They would’ve had computers, keyboards, and mice at each, I’m sure, but virtually everyone used laptops.

The room would remain virtually empty all day. Typically, no more than 10-20 people would come in and rattle around in the space. We had a huge downstairs hall with snacks and drinks, as well as a collection of games (ping pong, billiards, darts, a drum set), which was usually mostly empty. You’d get people from all over the building (not just my huge empty room) collecting around lunchtime, but nowhere filling the space. The only time the room saw its full potential was durin the infrequent mandatory meetings. The building also had several manufacturing floors and shop space, most of it mostly if not completely empty.

At my current job there are numerous unoccupied offices and unused spaces.

To be fair, at several of my previous jobs there were entire floors of unoccupied desks, used, if anything, for storage.

13

This is us as well. Our offices are full and it’s nice as I hated working from home full-time.

14

I’m fascinated by this thread…but I’m confused, so I have a request:
Please describe what type of work you do at your computer screen, when at home and at the office. Because I can’t really imagine all those empty spaces in a functioning organization..

I worked (retired this year!) for a very small engineering business–owned by one man, with 2 professional employees and one admin in the office, and two in the field( on construction sites.)

Not being together physically in the office would make the work flow impossible.

So I am curious, how does everybody else manage to work from home full time?

The nature of my work required a lot of collaboration, and it would be hard for any of us to work from home . Every hour or two, we’d look over the other’s shoulder to show each other engineering drawings , deciding together to make changes, compare them to earlier versions of the design, etc.

Then my boss would approve or not, often based on me showing him a step-by step process of how I performed a calculation, drawing a few extra temporary lines on the screen to show why I calculated a change from X to Y, and then removing the temporary lines. Maybe a 5 or 10-minute process..but much easier to do when two people are side-by-side, and not on Zoom. Especially because the process also depends on having paper hand-written notes from the field engineers spread out on my desk where we both can see them.

Even the administrative stuff was collaborative.
Example: often I would shout across the room to the admin person–“which architect on the Smith project sent us this revised plan yesterday–I need to ask him some questions. Get him on the phone for me–quick!..and oh yeah, remind me what is name of his boss? , I don’t want to cuss at the wrong idiot”.
Again…it’s a simple, 30 second conversation which I suppose we could do on Zoom, but it would be much more inconvenient.

After all 4 of us working together for a couple decades, we had a wealth of “institutional knowledge” which is most easily shared and accumulated by being together in person. (Which clients were important, which clerks in the city government held the real power to approve permits, which clients didn’t pay on time, and therefore I should delay doing the technical work they requested, etc.)
Again…this could all be done on Zoom calls, but you learn so much more from casual conversation around the proverbial water cooler…

It seems to me that being together physically makes for a business which runs more smoothly.

15

They’ve announced they’re closing our office next summer when the lease is up. Unfortunately, we have a couple of programs that do forms processing and scanning, which isn’t work you can do from home – contractually it has to be done in a secure facility. So now they’re scrambling trying to figure out where they can ship this work off to. You’d think maybe they would have thought about that before deciding to close the office. :roll_eyes:

16

None of my work is “collaborative” to the extent that it cannot be handled via phone calls, IMs, emails.

A caseload of numerous similar matters progresses through our office, generally with certain people handling it at various steps in the process, and then handing it off to the next person. So, all I need to do is see which matters are in statuses that I control, ensure that everything that SHOULD have been done before has been done, do my part, and then pass it on. There are a limited number of managers who oversee the process.

One of my particular steps involves hour-long meetings which can occur over the phone, via video, or in person. In person used to be the default. Now, very few are in person, with the vast majority via phone.

Although mine is a government/law office, I would assume similar practices would work in many other situations.

Your “shouting across the office” can be done pretty readily via instant messaging. I suspect that your experience, in a 4-person engineering firm, doing (what sounds like) custom assignments, is quite exceptional compared to what works just fine in most workplaces. I also suspect that you 4 were very accustomed to your past habits, and saw no real reason to change them. If you were so motivated, I suspect you could quite readily consult with your boss and obtain approval virtually. I do not know why being side-by-side would really be better than sharing your computer screen while simultaneously speaking via audio.

And I say all of this as someone who pretty strongly resists many/most technological changes unless/until I am required to, or am shown there is a clear benefit. Our office used to be all in person and paper based. When we went to virtual, it was pretty easy, and the quality/quantity of work done is pretty similar.

17

At the office or at home: people sit at desks and most work is done thru your computer screen. Interactions are done via phone call or video call - the office work is the same no matter where your computer is located. Most of the work is management of information, and collaboration is all electronic - via virtual meetings and sharing your screen. Printing stuff is of a bygone era in my organization. I managed a 6-month project earlier this year where people were scattered all over the globe - the team never was together in-person. In fact, most of us did not share our photo in the meetings app, so we didn’t even know what one another looks like - it was just voices.

18

My employer (major tech consulting firm) does maintain an office about 25 miles away. Even before COVID, it was usually half empty on the few times I had to be there. The vast majority of employees work either at home, or at the client site.

My current client is government, but is in another state and time zone, so I’ve literally NEVER been there. Even before the executive order, everyone local had been required to return to the office one day a week. I have no idea how crowded the place is now.

Before COVID, I was on a project which had a lot of remote people (as in, not even in the area), and a few locals. At one point, the contract said we had to have x number of warm bodies in seats per month. The manager asked me to be one of those, since I’m local. So one day a week, I’d take the Metro downtown, sit in a hotelling spot in the same room as one or two of our contacts, and do exactly the same stuff I’d have done at home. Only interaction with people there was when we all went to grab lunch at a specific food truck. So I wasted 2 hours a day commuting, and got less done than if I’d been at home.

19

College professor in the humanities here. The academic building I work in sometimes feels like a ghost town. About half of our core curriculum classes (freshman comp, sophomore lit surveys) are now online, and those sections always fill up first. Most of our upper-level classes for majors are still face to face, but enrollment is way down. Right now I have eight students in my F2F Brit Lit I survey (and it’s dire, none of them likes to talk), thirteen in World Lit I (this is actually pretty nice, with a good group of students), three in Shakespeare (happily, a very engaged three).

It feels like I’m in a slowly dying profession, but on the other hand, the online classes usually fill up and then some (we get a flood of requests to add students over the official cap), and we have a primarily online MFA program in creative writing that is thriving, so maybe it’s just changing? OTOH, AI is a major, major issue in our online programs, at least at the undergrad level, and I feel like we’re just a few years away from the bachelor’s degree either becoming a completely meaningless credential.

20

My wife teaches business law at a community college, and she says the same. When classes went virtual, she observed, “This is just an exercise in creative cheating.” Now, they don’t even seem to try to be creative…

At her school, it seems a fair number of students prefer to come to campus for in-person classes. I personally think a student would derive considerable benefit from her in class lectures.