·After the Delta variant disrupted plans to reopen after Labor Day, many businesses pushed their targets further out or left them open-ended.
Now September is out as an option, and it is anybody’s guess when workers will return to their offices in large numbers. “How much certainty are you really giving people by throwing an arbitrary date out there?” said Todd Brady, Intel’s director of global public affairs. “If we say Oct. 1, who knows?”
Leading the charge of postponements are technology firms, which tend to have significant portions of employees who can do their jobs from home. In April, before delta had become the dominant strain of the virus in the United States, Airbnb moved its date all the way to September 2022. “Within a company, a CEO can say: ‘Our company, our culture, our business. We need to be together, we need to be in the office, this is the date,’ ” said Mary Kay O’Neill, a senior health consultant at Mercer Consulting Group. “And then our friends in HR are like, ‘How are we going to do that?’ ”