NEW YORK - Boarded-up stores, shuttered restaurants and empty office towers: Covid-19 has turned New York's famous business districts into ghost towns, with companies scrambling to come up with ways to entice workers to return post-pandemic.
"Customers that you saw three, four, five times a week just virtually disappeared," McClure told AFP, recalling March of last year when the pandemic first swept New York, where it has killed more than 26,000 people. Seventy-nine percent of employees questioned in a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey published this month said that working remotely had been a success, but the report also found that offices are not about to be consigned to history.
Experts say companies should transform their offices away from places where employees come to send emails or make phone calls, which they can do at home, towards more appealing spaces suited for mentoring, camaraderie and fostering creativity.
While offering staff flexibility, several major employers are doubling-down on their commitment to offices, betting big on New York's business districts despite the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. It has staff coming in on "a rotational basis," and the firm plans to proceed with its move into a new state-of-the-art building near Grand Central Station this year, vice-chairman Robert Ivanhoe told AFP.