If you’re not planning to head back to the office anytime soon, you’re not the only one.
Many of Massachusetts’s white-collar employees expect to be conducting business remotely into 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, a new survey found.
Only one-fifth of the workforce expects to be back at their workplace by Labor Day, and 39 percent anticipates to return by January, according to the survey, conducted earlier this month by the nonprofit public policy group Massachusetts Competitive Partnership and its business association collaborators.
Of the 106 companies — representing 127,229 employees — surveyed between Aug. 3 and 14, 40 percent responded they are still operating 100 percent remotely, while 92 percent reported over 50 percent of all employees are working from home.
Most of the companies involved in the survey, approximately 51 percent of them, are based in either Boston or Cambridge, while 44 percent are located in suburban areas, and another 5 percent are outside Interstate 495.
In all, 82 percent of employees at the companies who participated in the survey are still at home.
“Employers are saying in part that they don’t want to bring people in who can work from home [and] still be productive,” Jay Ash, president and CEO of the Partnership, told The Boston Globe. “Almost as importantly, we don’t want to have too many people at our worksite, because we don’t want people to get sick and spread it amongst each other. … You can’t afford to have all your people in the office, and have a virus ravage the office.”
The findings offer a glimpse at some of the long-term impacts the coronavirus pandemic may have on the workplace in the Bay State, with 47 percent of the employees at these companies anticipating continuing to work remotely even after a COVID-19 vaccine is in place.
While the large majority of respondents, or 84 percent, are satisfied with the state’s reopening guidelines to date, companies are considering what the future may look like for their offices, even beyond the health crisis.
Sixty percent of respondents indicated they are considering moving or allowing more work to be conducted out-of-state, and 54 percent said they are considering reducing their office space footprint. A mere 8 percent said they are considering moving a portion of their urban office space to a suburban location.
“These are sobering numbers for Massachusetts and its economy,” Ash, also a former state economic development secretary under Gov. Charlie Baker, said in a statement. “Employers and the talent they attract are the bedrock of Massachusetts’s competitiveness. The pandemic will have a lasting impact on how people work; our hope is that these survey results inform not only business leaders, but policymakers alike, as they think about economic recovery and the challenges and competition we face for jobs and the tax revenues they produce.”
In the meantime, 16 percent of the respondents indicated they are not satisfied with the current state guidelines, which cap in-person capacity at 50 percent of an office’s regular occupancy limit.
Factors impacting employers’ decisions for returning to the workplace include the wait for a COVID-19 treatment or vaccine (44 percent), employee sentiment (44 percent), the wait for infection rates to reduce (40 percent), the opening of schools (38 percent), and the availability of child care (25 percent).
Eighty-seven percent of companies said they are concerned about how both the lack of child care availability and the limited, in-person return to elementary and secondary schools will impact employee productivity, attendance, and engagement.
Most companies also indicated they are not offering testing for employees: 56 percent of those who aren’t said they want to learn more, while 30 percent who aren’t said they don’t need more information about it.
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Back to the office? Not even by January for many Mass. companies, survey finds. - Boston.com
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