Chicago companies are plotting returns to the office. It won’t be as simple as turning off Zoom.
After more than a year of cameo appearances by kids, spouses and pets, work meetings may be headed toward pre-pandemic formality.
The reemergence of downtown Chicago offices in the upcoming months could mean the window is closing on an unprecedented look into colleagues’ home lives via Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Some experts say the use of virtual platforms, forced into action by the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, unexpectedly humanized co-workers in a way that working side-by-side never did.
Now, as many large companies begin nudging employees back to the workplace, executives and human resources departments are weighing how soon, and how strictly, they should return to rigid conventions of the office.
“One of the things I’ve found totally fascinating as a social scientist is, if you remember early in the pandemic everybody started using backgrounds in Zoom,” said Edward “Ned” Smith, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
“Over time, people started dropping their virtual backgrounds and started having their house as the background,” said Smith, an expert on management and organizational culture. “A lot of people don’t bring too much of their home to the office. During this time, we all allowed one another into each other’s houses, and with that we saw which kid was screaming or which dog couldn’t be managed.
“Some of that has preserved or even enhanced organizational culture. It’s very different to see a picture of kids on your desk rather than seeing a mess in the background made by your kids. It seemed like people were OK with that.”
After months of expanded vaccinations, and recent relaxing of guidelines for masks and social distancing by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, employers including financial services firms BMO Financial Corp. and JPMorgan Chase are pushing for large numbers of employees to return downtown this summer.
The peek at workers’ vulnerabilities and quirks has led to more open conversations about their well-being, said Dave Casper, the Chicago-based U.S. CEO of BMO.
“I think it is actually easier today, because of what we’ve gone through, to have some of these conversations,” Casper said in a recent roundtable discussion hosted by World Business Chicago and BOMA/Chicago, an association of 240 downtown buildings.
“It’s been easier to talk about what the issues are,” Casper said. “It’s been easier for people to kind of open up, in their home, where BMO has been an uninvited guest now for over a year. People are getting comfortable saying, ‘Here are my issues.’ They’re more honest.
“We have to be much more understanding of what the issues are, and at the end of the day get people to want to come back and not shame them into it.”
How many workers return, and how quickly, also will affect the well-being of downtown Chicago, which some experts have predicted could take years to fully bounce back from the pandemic. The downtown office market ended 2020 with a record amount of vacant space.
“I think most business leaders in Chicago are much more optimistic than a few months back,” said Michael Fassnacht, president and CEO of World Business Chicago and the city’s chief marketing officer. “So I make the prediction that by July, 80% of the downtown and Loop and Fulton Market workforce will be back in the offices, at least three days a week. That’s how optimistic I am. And that’s what I’m hearing based on the breadth of business leaders I’m talking to.”
The return to downtown offices could accelerate even more after Labor Day, according to real estate and workplace experts, although it’s unclear whether the number of downtown workers ever will return to pre-pandemic levels.
“What the density of downtown work is going to look like is still very much an open question,” said Farzin Parang, executive director of BOMA/Chicago. “Everything is connected, but I feel like offices are the driver. There were 600,000 people coming downtown to work, and then they’re going to the theater or out to dinner.”
Working from home has provided safety and convenience for white-collar workers, particularly those with children. Yet the past 14 months also have hatched new terms such as “Zoom fatigue” and “languishing” — a work-from-home fogginess in which a worker is neither failing nor thriving.
Jane Fraser, a longtime banking executive who became the first female CEO at New York-based megabank Citi in March, recently told the Economic Club of Chicago that the relentlessness of working from home has left everyone exhausted, and she was looking forward to the socialization and collaboration that comes with working in an office.
“God bless Zoom and God bless the videos and Microsoft Teams and all the other platforms, Webex, that we’ve been using, but it’s not the replacement,” Fraser said. “I’m concerned around culture in organizations, because we’ve depleted the asset that many companies have of everyone knowing each other, that sense of belonging to an institution, that purpose, that identity, and it’s been lonely for many people.”
At the same time, Fraser said employers will have to build more flexibility into the office environment after more than a year of working remotely.
Soon after Fraser took the reins of Citi in March, she implemented Zoom-free Fridays, banning employees from using internal video chats for at least one day of the week, part of a broader effort to strike a healthier work-life balance during the pandemic and beyond.
Fraser said she uses her own Zoom-free Fridays to relocate from a desk to an armchair, trading in her computer screen for paper documents. She also adds boundaries to the rest of her seemingly endless remote workdays, carving out time to work out and clocking out at night to have dinner with her son, who is home from college.
Citi and other companies will need to show empathy and emphasize flexibility as employees begin to transition back to the office, Fraser said.
“We’re going to have to invest a lot when we all are back at work,” she said. “I think most clients I speak to will certainly give flexibility during this year.”
Fraser didn’t put a timetable on Citi’s return to the office but is clearly looking forward to that day.
“At the end of the day, we’re typically better together for apprenticeship, for feedback, for collaboration and for energy levels, for the human touch,” Fraser said.
At Black Opal Cosmetics, CEO Desiree Rogers expects to move slowly on requiring workers to return to its offices within the 1871 incubator in the Merchandise Mart. The Chicago-based company has many mothers on its payroll.
Even so, Rogers acknowledges limitations of remote work.
“Here’s what I have noticed: If you knew the person well before the pandemic, then on a Zoom or on a phone call you know their mannerisms, you know if they said this they might mean that. You know them,” Rogers said during the recent roundtable discussion. “For new people coming in, we don’t know them.
“So sometimes there’s confusion or people might get bent out of shape about something … because they don’t know the people. It’s been harder to integrate people on our team through Zooms, with people not having any time to socialize.”
Time will tell whether a hybrid model of working some days from home and some in the office will become the norm, or whether a mostly office-based culture will return.
“Workers, especially parents, have gotten used to having more flexibility,” Kellogg’s Smith said. “Taking that away in one fell swoop would not be wise, I don’t think.”
Even for workers without children, many have come to enjoy skipping a long commute, wearing casual clothes and saving money by eating at home. Office life may be a culture shock for people now accustomed to running an errand or going for a walk in the middle of the day.
In the months to come, firms may need to establish “a more structured flexibility,” Smith said.
“It’s not going to be feasible for people to just leave the office when there’s supposed to be a meeting,” he said. “It’s going to be a tricky but important thing to figure out.”
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