Jp Morgan, Microsoft and more. Here are the financial reasons for scrapping home working
Some American giants, such as JP Morgan, Microsoft and Apple, want employees to return to the office. Here are the real financial and real estate reasons. Camilla Conti's article for La Verità
The big corporations of Wall Street are fed up with smart working: with their offices emptied, the large owned offices scattered between the skyscrapers of New York and the "spaceships" of the Californian Valley risk becoming assets that no longer yield and therefore must be devalued, affecting the heritage. That's why the bosses of the US financial, tech and industrial groups want to shut down the meeting season remotely as soon as possible by vaccinating all employees. Those of JP Morgan, for example, will be asked to enter their vaccination status in an online database organized by the bank.
Anyone who proves to be immunized will not even have to wear a mask in the office. The chief executive of the finance giant, Jamie Dimon, wants to rotate US-based staff back to the office by July. It is also trying to figure out how to make vaccines mandatory for employees. In the meantime, he has sent a reminder to everyone underlining that for fully vaccinated employees, “life in the office will be a little closer to what it once was. We invite you to start taking all the necessary precautions to return successfully ».
Dimon has been a strong supporter of Covid-19 vaccines and has already reopened some offices on 17 May. "Most professionals learn their work through an apprenticeship model, which is almost impossible to replicate in the Zoom world," wrote the CEO in the communication. Stressing that "over time, remote work could drastically undermine the character and culture" of Jp Morgan. "There is an absence of" spontaneous learning and creativity because you don't meet people at the coffee machine, you don't talk to customers in unexpected scenarios or you don't travel to meet customers and employees for feedback on your products and services. ".
But more than due to the lack of sociality, smart working risks weighing on the end-of-year accounts due to the value of the real estate assets owned. Among other things, the US financial giant has a project to build a new gigantic headquarters in New York. The building at 270 Park Avenue, which is expected to open in 2024, for a price of $ 3 billion, will house approximately 14,000 employees.
Microsoft has also announced that part of its employees will return to work in the Redmond (Washington) office, Google has invested 7 billion dollars in new data centers and new offices and also the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook , a fan of work from home. at the beginning of the pandemic, he has now said he is looking forward to his employees returning to the site. Some office building owners are also implementing coronavirus testing programs. These, combined with vaccines, should make it easier – and safer – for workers to be reintegrated.
According to the rating agency Fitch, the profits of large real estate companies are likely to drop by 30 percent. And thus depress their stock market values and open up to sustainability problems of their exposures with the banks, of which they are traditionally large debtors.
At the Monetary Fund they tried to calculate the overall effect on the economy of a fall in the stock market of large real estate. A drop of even half a point in their stock market values, compared to the historical trend and what the fundamentals would suggest, puts up to two points of GDP at risk within a few years. And their market capitalization is directly linked to the amount of space they can't rent. In five years, that value can drop by as much as 15 percent, compared to the expected trend, if the amount of unoccupied square meters increases by 5 percent.
(Extract from an article published by La Verità)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/jp-morgan-microsoft-apple-e-non-solo-sono-stufi-dello-smart-working/ on Sun, 23 May 2021 05:17:19 +0000.