Office occupancy in the United States hit a pandemic high over the past week, according to data tracked by security company Kastle Systems.
Ten of the country's top metropolitan areas saw an average of 47.5% of workers returning to their offices compared with pre-pandemic levels. The occupancy rate is up nearly 4% from the week before Labor Day, when bosses at major companies drew the latest line with the push to return to offices. At the same time last year, the national average was less than 31%.
Sept. 14 proved the busiest day yet across the country, with the national average creeping up to 54.5% of pre-pandemic levels, the highest since early 2020, according to Kastle.
Even so, office occupancy in the United States remains below half of what it was in 2019, according to Kastle's data, with a growing divergence between office attendance on the coasts and elsewhere. Data from early 2020 shows occupancy at well above 90% for most metro areas.
Texas cities such as Austin, Dallas and Houston have been seeing occupancy levels around 55% compared with pre-pandemic levels in recent weeks. Philadelphia and San Francisco's averages, meanwhile, just hit 40% last week. Washington, New York and Los Angeles are about 45%, as is Chicago.
Texas was one of the first states to shift toward "living with the virus, rather than hiding from it," said Kris Larson, president and chief executive of Central Houston. "Culturally, there's just a desire to get back to work."
But for the five months leading up to Labor Day, office occupancy in Houston had reached a "glass ceiling," said Larson. Since the holiday, the city has seen "a really big push to get folks back in the office," he said.
"We are seeing some incremental increase in expectation for folks to get back in the workplace more often throughout the workweek," Larson said.
Kastle Chairman Mark Ein said he expects occupancy to keep moving higher in the coming months. The risks surrounding the coronavirus and the labor shortage made it hard for employers to enforce office mandates, even with vaccines available and deaths declining. But as the economic outlook darkened and people decided that they're "going to live with covid," those barriers have broken down, Ein said.
Public transit ridership has been climbing in Washington and New York City, where banks The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were among the first companies to bring back workers to offices.
"We had four false starts on bringing people back to the office," said Kathy Wylde, chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a group representing hundreds of major employers. "This feels like we're finally putting the pandemic behind us."
Downtown businesses are seeing the return of the work lunch, Wylde said. The sidewalks are crowded with workers, although international tourists have yet to return in full force.
"We are hearing more and more that employees are recognizing that their career advancement depends on relationships and getting back to the office," Wylde said. "We think that will continue to advance."
But after big companies such as Apple Inc., Peloton Interactive Inc., NBCUniversal and its parent, Comcast Corp., pushed to bring workers back to offices after Labor Day, some employees fought to hang onto the flexibility they found in the pandemic.
Nearly 1,500 current and former Apple employees signed a letter asking the company to "stop trying to control how often you can see us in the office."
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Others are confronting logistical barriers. At Tesla Inc., whose chief executive Elon Musk asked employees to come back 40 hours a week in the spring, offices are not equipped to handle the influx of workers, according to CNBC.
Tesla did not respond to a request from The Washington Post.
A shortage of desks, chairs, parking spots and other resources hampered efforts to bring back employees in the San Francisco Bay area three days a week, CNBC reported. The company set staggered in-office schedules with employees instead coming two days a week.
Having less access to work resources and feeling less connected to company culture ranked among the top disadvantages of hybrid work, according to a recent Gallup poll of more than 8,000 remote-capable workers. So did decreased collaboration and impaired relationships with coworkers.
In its return-to-office efforts, software giant SAP SE emphasized shared space in cities, such as Montreal, and revamped other sites, such as its San Francisco Bay office, to focus more on innovation. It's hosted ice cream socials, philanthropy team-building events and "Work from Work Wednesdays."
"We've gotten creative because there's only so many virtual happy hours you can take," said Lloyd Adams, president of SAP North America.
The long-term verdict on offices remains up in the air, and it's going to take a while to work itself out, said Jeff Adler, vice president of the data division of Yardi, a property-management software company that works with offices worldwide.
The return-to-work calculus has been constantly changing for each industry, each company, Adler said, and needs are still evolving.
"Nothing happens quickly in office, nothing is happening quickly," he said. "We're in the messy, mushy middle."
Yardi's clients are seeing leases, which usually run in increments of more than five years, get shorter. Retention and renewal rates are down compared with pre-pandemic times, Adler said, and there's greater interest in coworking spaces.
Still, "the best marquee buildings are leasing very nicely, very quickly," Adler said. "Because if you're going to have a place, you might as well have a good one, right?"