Five-Day office week is dead? Work from home here to stay? Even bosses are giving up

tech.hindustantimes.com:

With pandemic restrictions in the U.K. largely gone, offices are getting busier. Yet vast numbers of desks still remain empty. Even with Covid-19 case numbers flat or falling in the U.K., U.S. and much of Europe, many employees are still actively choosing to work from home for at least part of the week. It’s increasingly hard for managers to claim that their offices will simply fill up when the virus abates. Companies large and small are now adopting hybrid work patterns unrecognizable from pre-pandemic routines — all but killing off the five-day-a-week commute.

Few predicted such a seismic shift, even when the pandemic began. “Everybody really did have an expectation that it would all go back to normal. And I think now is a dawning realization that it isn’t,” said Julia Hobsbawm, author of The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future, to be published in the U.K. this month and the U.S. in April.

Firms or managers toying with a full-time return face an uncomfortable reality, experts say: Without significant pay incentives that only the richest firms can offer, staff are increasingly likely to look elsewhere. For everyone else, wholesale changes to workplace culture are needed to retain and attract the best.

Almost a year after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Solomon famously called working from home “an aberration,” the bank he leads is still sticking to its guns. Goldman’s expectation is that staff will work from the office, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be named.

Policies at other banks are more nuanced. JPMorgan Chase & Co. expects U.K.-based staff back in the office for at least some days a week. Citigroup Inc. has  similar plans. Standard