While Europeans and Asians return to the office, Americans choose smart working. Wsj report
Return-to-office rates in Paris and Tokyo have even exceeded 75%, while in the United States they range between 40% and 60% compared to pre-pandemic levels. The Wall Street Journal article
While US offices are half-empty three years after the Covid-19 pandemic, workplaces in Europe and Asia are once again buzzing, writes The Wall Street Journal .
Americans have embraced remote working and are leaving offices more regularly than their overseas counterparts. US office occupancy is between 40% and 60% of pre-pandemic levels, with variations within this range by month and by city. According to JLL, a real estate services company that manages 4.6 billion square meters of real estate worldwide, the office occupancy rate is between 70% and 90% in Europe and the Middle East.
Return to the office is even more common in Asia, according to JLL, where rates range from 80% to 110%, meaning that in some cities, there are more people in the office today than before the pandemic.
Larger homes, longer commutes and a tighter job market help explain why Americans spend less time in the office than Europeans and Asians, according to employment advisers.
This divergence in return-to-office habits not only benefits overseas homeowners more than their U.S. peers but also has a direct impact on how quickly metropolitan areas recover from the economic shock of the pandemic. Cities in Europe and Asia have recovered relatively well, while vacant office buildings and lack of commuters have hampered the recovery in US cities like New York and San Francisco, where restaurants, shops and other local businesses have suffered. they rely on office workers as their main customers.
According to a report by the New School Center for New York City Affairs, the number of unemployed in New York increased by 83,500 between the beginning of 2020 and the third quarter of 2022, while the city's unemployment rate rose well beyond the national average. Many of those who lost their jobs worked in Manhattan in people-touch industries, such as retail and food and beverage services.
If Manhattan has been particularly hard hit due to its reliance on office commuters, other central business districts across the United States are also struggling. Falling office values threaten to hit the budgets of cities that depend on property taxes. The decline in transport journeys weighs on the finances of the public transport authorities. The addition of new apartments can help revitalize central business districts, but it will take time.
According to JLL, several overseas capitals have seen periods where more than 75% of workers returned to their desks in 2021 and 2022. These include Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore in Asia. Paris regularly tops the list of returned office workers in Europe. Stockholm was no different, with several months having a return-to-office rate of over 75%.
None of the major US cities surveyed by JLL achieved such a high return rate over the period.
“The United States has borne the brunt of this situation,” said Phil Ryan, director of City Futures at JLL.
One of the reasons for this difference in working habits is to be found in the living conditions. Americans are more likely to live in spacious suburban homes. This makes it easier to create a home office away from distractions. Small apartments in Hong Kong, for example, often house multiple generations, making working from home less appealing.
Suburban sprawl means many Americans are having to make longer, more boring road trips, plagued by increasingly frequent traffic jams—another reason to stay home. While even some European cities have average long commutes, New York and Chicago are unrivaled, according to mobility services company Moovit. Public transportation systems in Europe and Asia are often more reliable and less prone to delays, making it easier to get to work.
“We have densely packed cities with efficient public transport systems,” said Caroline Pontifex, director of workplace experience at London-based consultancy KKS Savills. "That makes the difference."
Another explanation for the uniqueness of American offices is the job market. With an unemployment rate of 3.4%, the United States is just half the unemployment rate of the European Union at 6.1%. While Europe is also facing labor shortages, US companies have been particularly hard hit, said JLL's Ryan.
This has forced them to look further afield and hire remotely. Tech companies, which account for a particularly large share of employment in some large US cities, have long been more tolerant of remote working.
Co-working firms are also reporting a decline in employment in some US cities. WeWork said 72% of its desks in New York were leased in Q4 2022, compared to 80% in Paris, 81% in London and 82% in Singapore.
Workplace consultants say they expect the gap in office utilization between the United States and the rest of the world to persist.
It doesn't help that US offices were emptier long before the pandemic. An abundance of construction has led to high vacancy rates, and even within the leased offices companies tended to place fewer people on each floor than their European and Asian peers.
All of this empty space is now creating a strengthening negative cycle, according to Phil Kirschner, an associate partner at business consultancy McKinsey & Co. Americans who sit in large, mostly empty offices find the experience depressing and are more likely to stay at home.
(Excerpt from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/mentre-europei-e-asiatici-tornano-in-ufficio-gli-americani-scelgono-lo-smart-working/ on Sun, 05 Mar 2023 06:58:29 +0000.