"The era of baking bread on a weekday morning or wearing pajama bottoms below an ironed shirt for video office meetings appears to be on the wane in the Bay Area. Lockdowns during the early stages of the COVID pandemic wrought seismic, lasting changes to the way people work, with full-time at-home employment leading to widely adopted hybrid mixes of remote and in-office work that remain popular among many workers and employers."
""It's a surprising result," said Russell Hancock, Joint Venture's president and CEO. "We have seen many employers say, 'The game's up, we need you back in the office.' I'm hearing that most of all in the intensive areas of our economy like AI and the startup environment. This has become a hard valley ... as opposed to the soft valley when everyone was enjoying their perks, having their work-life balance.""
Bay Area work patterns are shifting from widespread hybrid and remote arrangements toward increased in-person attendance as employers call workers back to offices. Tech and startup sectors, especially AI-intensive firms, are leading the push for daily office presence. Major companies have adjusted policies to emphasize innovation, collaboration and connection as reasons for more on-site time. Reduced weekday downtown populations have weakened local service and retail businesses that depended on office workers. A regional poll of 1,743 adults across five counties captured these changing sentiments and measured the impact on urban commercial districts and commuter routines.
Read at The Mercury News
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