#return-to-office

#return-to-office

However, one overlooked impact of return-to-work policies is that they do not account for air quality issues in commercial buildings, The Way Commercial Cleaning notes. This trend, dubbed sick building syndrome, can be detrimental to employees' effectiveness once they get back into the swing of sharing office space. Once understood, it explains why indoor air quality services are increasingly in demand.

They're gonna work very hard. We need to put some guardrails [in] so they don't injure themselves, but I don't think we could prevent them from working hard and still make the kind of games we make.

Bloomberg reports that Naughty Dog has had developers working mandatory overtime as it races to complete a demo of the sci-fi action game for Sony to review, despite a planned release date that's still years away. The mandatory overtime reportedly began in October, with staff being asked to work a minimum of eight extra hours a week and logging them on an internal spreadsheet.

The company has told US staffers across several large divisions that they will need to return to the office five days a week next year, two affected workers told Business Insider. The return-to-office push, which kicks off in September, will affect US employees across a wide set of roles, including staffers who work on advertising sales, marketing, and product, the employees said.

Start by getting a physical examination to make sure that your body is healthy. Talk to your doctor about how you are feeling, and ask for recommendations to support your new routine. Next, map out things you can do during the workday to up your energy. Typically, people get a bit lethargic after lunch and toward late afternoon. Can you take a 15-minute break right before you normally get sluggish and take a vigorous walk outside your building?

It turns out the return-to-office movement isn't just about productivity, collaboration or company culture. For a significant number of companies, it is about leases - those binding, long-term commitments to office spaces that are now sitting underused while hybrid work proves its staying power. A recent Resume.org survey of 900 business leaders peels back the polished justifications for workplace mandates and reveals the financial tether that's quietly shaping policy: the office lease.

"This is a moment where corporate America is backsliding on women," Sheryl Sandberg, the former Facebook executive who founded Lean In, tells Axios. Despite years of corporate pledges to advance women, 54% of HR professionals surveyed by the group now say women's career advancement is a priority at their organization - and that falls to 46% for women of color. That marks a sharp drop from 2017, when gender equity surged on to corporate agendas after Donald Trump's election and 88% of companies told Lean In it was a high priority.

"We're no longer just designing workplaces, we're actually designing experiences," said Yuen, at the Fortune Brainstorm Design forum in Macau on Dec. 2. "You've really got to make the campus or the workplace more than work, and that's the fun part of it."

Nearly six years after the coronavirus pandemic began, Meta-owned Instagram is bringing its employees back into the office for a full five days a week. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the news to staff in a Monday memo that was then published by journalist Alex Heath's Sources newsletter - Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed its veracity to SFGATE. The five-day order, just for employees under Mosseri, goes into effect Feb. 2, giving employees a couple of more months with their current three-day mandate.

Unnecessary meetings and endless PowerPoints need to be replaced with clear objectives and more prototypes, he wrote. One-on-one meetings should also be biweekly by default, he added, and employees should feel free to decline meetings that fall within their "focus blocks." "Every six months, we'll cancel all recurring meetings and only re-add the ones that are absolutely necessary," he wrote.

Late last month, reports surfaced that Microsoft Teams would add a new feature in December of this year, which would pinpoint the location of any employee using the company's Wi-Fi. For example, if your Chicago-based manager has the expectation that you work in the New York office four days a week, but you only make it to the office two days a week, your boss will soon know.

Across KPMG's offices nationwide, employees say they prefer round tables. So with that feedback and more in mind, the Big Four consulting firm designed and opened a new, 450,000-square-foot office at Two Manhattan West in Manhattan's Hudson Yards neighborhood. The firm hopes the gleaming new headquarters will not only reassert its presence in New York City but also tempt its more than 5,000 employees in New York back to the office more often.

It may sound strange, but it's true, and a harbinger of a new détente between workers and employers. Five years after the pandemic, denizens of the white collar sector have been slowly but definitively strong-armed into returning to the office. An increasing number of companies have tightened their flexible work policies, which have idled commercial real estate across the country, and driven a number of business districts to the brink of desolation.

Since announcing the policy, Ford has sent some employees emails telling them that they are not badging in enough and warning that they could face termination if they do not improve their attendance, three current and former Ford employees told Business Insider. Two said they had received these emails despite complying with updated office attendance policies and having previous work-from-home arrangements signed off by their managers.