Employees are returning to work at corporate offices, but they are going in for fewer days a week than they were before the pandemic. Office attendance has stabilized at 30 percent below prepandemic norms, according to McKinsey Global Institute partner Jan Mischke, senior partner Aditya Sanghvi, and colleagues. Among survey respondents in several large global cities, there is only a small gap between the number of days they currently work in the office and the number of days they expect to work there in the future.
The main exhibit is a series of ten dot plots with each dot on the plot representing the reported days per week worked in the office in one of nine major metro areas around the world. Three are in Europe, three in the United States, and three in Asia. They are ordered in their ideal number of days they would like to work from least to most. The data is on a rolling animation with current days per week as the first series of dots, ideal number of days as the second, and expected eventual number of days as the last. In most cases the ideal is less than current and expected eventual is more than current or ideal. In order of ideal the cities rank with San Francisco with the least at around 2.7 days per week, followed by London, Tokyo, Houston, Paris, Munich, New York City, Shanghai, and Beijing where the idea is about 4.1 days per week.
To read the report, see “Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate,” July 13, 2023.