“Nearly half of US workers steal time! Biometric readers improve accuracy! Give staff-controlled perks with vending machine access!”

Since the New Year, JP Morgan Chase, WPP, and Amazon have implemented return-to-office mandates. President Donald Trump instructed federal agency heads to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in person on a full-time basis. This follows five years after the pandemic, when many roles were successfully performed remotely or flexibly.

California-based global industry expert Josh Bersin said, “Two things are happening. The economy is slowing, so companies are hiring less. There is a broad productivity trend, and AI has caused almost every organisation to reallocate resources to AI projects.”

CEOs expect to cut many jobs. Back-to-work mandates are often prompted by irritation that both projects are hard to monitor or implement without knowing what individuals are doing at home. What exactly are we returning to?

RFID badges, GPS time clock apps, NFC apps, QR code clocking-in, Apple Watch badges, and palm, face, eye, voice, and finger scanners are all used across the US to track workers’ time, attendance, and productivity in manufacturing, retail, and fast food chains.

Biometric scanners have long been offered to employers to prevent hourly workers from “buddy punching” each other at the start and end of shifts—so-called “time theft.” A return-to-office mandate and its enforcement might lead to similar situations for salaried staff.

These time and attendance gadgets and apps now end with Austin-based HID’s OmniKey platform. This RFID log-in and security solution for industries, hospitals, universities, and workplaces uses smart cards, smartphone wallets, and wearables. These will monitor turnstile entrances, exits, elevator access, parking, conference rooms, the cafeteria, printers, lockers, and vending machine access.

These technologies and increasingly advanced worker location- and behaviour-tracking systems are spreading from blue-collar to pink-collar and white-collar jobs. According to the poll, 70%–80% of large American firms monitor employees, and PwC has notified staff that supervisors will track their location to enforce a three-day office week.

Cracked Labs’ Vienna-based workplace surveillance researcher Wolfie Christl said, “Several of these earlier technologies, like RFID sensors and low-tech barcode scanners, have been used in manufacturing, in warehouses, or in other settings for some time. All kinds of sensor data are being used, and this technology is entering offices. However, many of these may not make sense there.”

The ability to track workers within office buildings is new to the pandemic age of hybrid work. In November 2024, Cracked Labs published a terrifying 25-page case study showing how wireless networking, motion sensors, and Bluetooth beacons can provide “behavioural monitoring and profiling” in offices.

The project records workstation presence and room occupancy, and it tracks employees’ indoor location, movement, and behaviour. Spacewell uses motion sensors under desks, in ceilings, and at doorways in “office spaces,” along with heat sensors and low-resolution sight sensors to determine workstation and room occupancy. Managers can access real-time and trend data via the “live data floor plan,” and sensors collect temperature, ambient light intensity, and humidity data.

Locatee, based in Switzerland, leverages badge and device data via Wi-Fi and LAN to track clocking in and out, time spent at workstations and on floors, and weekly office hours and days. The software shows executives aggregate staff data, but Cracked Labs notes that Locatee gives a segmented team analytics report that “reveals data on small groups.”

Interest in “optimised” working environments is rising as more organisations return to the office. S&S Insider’s early 2025 forecast estimated the linked office’s value at $43 billion in 2023 and $122.5 billion by 2032. IndustryARC also estimates a $4.5 billion employee-monitoring-technology market, largely in North America, by 2026. However, the overlap is unclear.

Logitech unveiled its millimetre-wave radar Spot sensors at the end of January to help companies track room usage and which rooms are most popular. Logitech told The Verge that the peel-and-stick gadgets, which detect VOCs, temperature, and humidity, might predict meeting room audience placement.

According to Christl, these sensor-based systems’ functionality could lead to a shift from acceptable applications like energy use, worker health and safety, and office resource management to more intrusive ones.

For him, the fundamental concern is that if organisations use highly sensitive data like tracking employees’ gadgets and telephones indoors or using motion detectors indoors, “then there must be totally reliable safeguards that this data is not being used for any other purposes.”

Big brother watches

This alert is especially important for indoor workers’ location, movement, and conduct. Cisco Spaces has digitised 11 billion square feet of enterprise sites, yielding 24.7 trillion location data points. According to Cisco’s website, InterContinental Hotels Group, WeWork, the NHS Foundation, and San Jose State University use Spaces.

Stores, restaurants, hotels, and event venues can utilise it, but offices are the primary use case for meeting room management and occupancy monitoring. These areas provide an all-seeing view of how employees, clients, and visitors, depending on the environment, and their linked gadgets, equipment, or “assets,” move around physical areas.

Cisco used its wireless infrastructure and linked Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth tracking to do this. Spaces provides employers with real-time and historical data dashboards. Use cases? Everything from meeting-room scheduling and cleaning schedule optimisation to more invasive dashboards on employees’ entry and exit times, staff workdays, floor visit durations, and other “behaviour metrics.” This includes performance metrics, a manufacturing site feature.
Cracked Labs describes how Spaces uses device usernames and identifiers to identify users in its statistics. MAC randomisation can preserve privacy, but Cisco says it renders indoor movement analytics “unreliable” and other uses unfeasible, forcing enterprises to decide.

Management can send staff nudge-style reminders based on building location. An IBM application based on Cisco’s technology can detect occupancy abnormalities and notify workers or management. Cisco Spaces can also use Cisco security cameras and WebEx video conferencing devices to monitor indoor movement, another example of workplace function creep from security to employee tracking.

Cisco said that Spaces “enhances workplace efficiency and employee experience” and was “built and engineered with privacy by design and industry-standard security measures.” The amount of data Spaces gives companies worries Christl.

“Cisco is everywhere,” he said, while adding, “Repurposing networking or IT infrastructure data becomes harmful when employers do so. I think a big manufacturer like Cisco has a responsibility to neither offer nor market irresponsible indoor location monitoring technologies based on its Wi-Fi networks. I would consider productivity and performance tracking quite problematic when based on intrusive behavioural data.”

Not just Cisco is doing this. Juniper’s Mist indoor tracking system, like Spaces, employs Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth beacons to find people, linked devices, and Bluetooth-tagged badges on a real-time map with up to 13 months of worker activity data.

Juniper’s offering for offices, hospitals, manufacturing sites, and retailers can provide employee device names, enter and exit times, and duration of visits between office “zones”—including a “break area/kitchen” in a demo. Each system has a variety of functional applications, some of which generate labour-law difficulties.

“A worst-case situation would be that management wishes to fire someone and then starts digging into prior records for misconduct,” adds Christl, while mentioning further, “If it’s necessary to investigate employees, a worker representative should work with management to examine fine-grained behavioural data. This would prevent misuse.”

Above and beyond?

American unions want more access to data and quotas used in disciplinary action, as Elizabeth Anderson, professor of public philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of “Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives,” explains.

She said, “Surveillance and this idea of time theft—it’s all connected to this idea of wasting time. Essentially, all relational work is considered inefficient. In a memory care unit, the system will say maybe an Alzheimer’s patient is frightened, so a nurse has to calm them down, or perhaps they lost some ability overnight. That’s not one of the discrete physical tasks that can be measured. Most of the work is helping that person cope with declining faculties; it takes time for people to read your emotions and respond appropriately. What you get is massive moral injury with this notion of efficiency.”
According to a 2023 Cracked Labs report on retail and hospitality, Oracle software rates and ranks servers based on speed, sales, timekeeping around breaks, and tips. Oracle software that monitors mobile workers, like hotel housekeepers and cleaners, uses a timer for app-based micromanagement.

Christl said, “People have to struggle to combine what they really do with this kind of rigid, digital system. And it’s not easy to standardise things like talking to patients and other kinds of affective work, like how friendly you are as a waiter. This is a major problem. These systems cannot represent the work that is being done accurately.”

Is it possible to measure and assess knowledge work in offices effectively? In a January episode of his podcast, host Ezra Klein struggled with his own feelings about having many of his best creative ideas at a cafe down the street from where he lives rather than in The New York Times’ Manhattan offices.
Elizabeth agrees that creativity often has to find its own. She said, “We know that daydreaming a little can actually help people come up with creative ideas. Allowing your mind to wander can significantly boost productivity, but it necessitates spending some time gazing around or outside. The software connected to your camera is saying you’re off-duty—that you’re wasting time. Nobody’s mind can keep focused for the whole workday, but…”

Elizabeth cites a scene in Erik Gandini’s 2023 documentary “After Work” that shows an Amazon delivery driver who is camera-monitored for driving, delivery quotas, and even using Spotify in the van.

“It’s very tightly regulated and super, super intrusive, and it’s all based on distrust as the starting point,” she said, while continuing, “What these tech bros don’t understand is that if you install surveillance technology, which is all about distrusting workers, there is a deep feature of human psychology that is reciprocity. If you don’t trust me, I won’t trust you.”

Trust issues

“Our research shows that excessive monitoring in the workplace can damage trust, have a negative impact on morale, and cause stress and anxiety,” said Hayfa Mohdzaini, senior policy and practice adviser for technology at the CIPD, the UK’s professional body for HR, learning, and development. Line manager training and employee engagement may improve productivity.

According to a 2023 Pew Research study, 56% of American workers opposed using AI to detect when employees were at their offices, and 61% opposed tracking their movements.

As Josh Bersin puts it, “Yes, the company can read your emails” with platforms like Teramind, even including “sentiment analysis” of employee messages. Only 51% of workers opposed recording work done on company computers using corporate “spyware,” which was accepted by private sector workers.

The WIRED’s interviews with employees at 13 federal agencies reveal the surveillance of government workers by Elon Musk’s DOGE team. Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, a Dynatrace extension, and Splunk have been added to government computers in recent weeks, and some people feel they can’t speak freely on record.
According to CBS News and NPR, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) implemented full X-ray security screenings in February, replacing entry badges at Washington, DC, headquarters. Additionally, managers informed staff that logging in and out of devices, swiping in and out of workspaces, and all digital work chats would be monitored.

Bersin suggests, “Maybe they’re trying to make a big deal out of it to scare people right now. The federal government is exploiting the back-to-work policy to lay off workers.”

DOGE staff have reportedly added keylogger software to government computers to track everything employees type, worried that anyone using progressive thinking or “disloyalty” to Trump could be targeted, not to mention the security risks for sensitive projects.

One worker told NPR it felt “Soviet-style” and “Orwellian” with “nonstop monitoring.” Elizabeth calls the DOGE playbook “deeply intrusive invasions of privacy.”

Another reality

But what employee protections exist? New York and Illinois give substantial privacy protections against private sector biometric tracking, and California’s “Consumer Privacy Act” includes workers and customers. The lack of federal labour law in this area makes the US a legal anomaly compared to the UK and Europe.

The “Electronic Communications Privacy Act” permits the monitoring of US employees for commercial purposes. EU workplace monitoring assessments by “Algorithm Watch” include the UK, Italy, Sweden, and Poland.

In early 2024, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ordered Serco to stop using Shopworks’ face recognition and fingerprint scanning systems to track the time and attendance of 2,000 staff at 38 leisure centres. Virgin Active removed similar biometric staff tracking systems from 30-plus facilities after this new guidance.

Though the United States lacks broad privacy rights, worker opposition, union organising, and media publicity can block some office monitoring methods. The “Service Employees International Union” wants rules to safeguard workers from black-box algorithms that set output speeds.

Boeing terminated a pilot of staff surveillance at Missouri and Washington locations using Ohio-based Avuity infrared motion sensors and VuSensor cameras in ceilings in December. Boeing reversed course when a worker released an occupancy- and headcount-tracking PowerPoint to The Seattle Times. In weeks, Boeing stated that administrators will remove all placed sensors.

Under-desk sensors have garnered significant attention, possibly due to their resemblance to surveillance hardware rather than software designed to record company operations. Northeastern University students hacked and deleted EnOcean under-desk sensors for “presence detection” and “people counting” in the “Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex” in fall 2022. The university provost informed students that the department would maximise desk usage with sensors and Spaceti.

OccupEye (now owned by FM: Systems), another under-desk heat and motion sensor, was protested and physically removed by Barclays Bank and The Telegraph employees in London. After the backlash, the ICO fined Barclays $1.1 billion for using Sapience’s employee monitoring software in its offices to track individual employees. That same software business now offers “lightweight device-level technology” to monitor return-to-office policy compliance, with a dashboard that breaks down employee location by office vs remote for individual departments and teams.

Elizabeth Anderson’s latest book, Hijacked, traces workplace surveillance culture and the fixation with employee productivity to the Puritans’ 16th- and 17th-century “work ethic” conception.

“They thought you should be working super hard; you shouldn’t hang around when you should be working. There are elements that could lead to worker hostility. The Puritans were time-conscious. It was about behaviour confirming salvation. The Industrial Revolution made ‘no wasting time’ a profit-maximising technique. You work 24/7 because they can email you. However, the original work ethic has lost or distorted several fundamental elements. The Puritans also required employers to pay a living wage and provide safe and healthy working conditions. They claimed you couldn’t dominate them tyrannically. Consider them fellow Christians and treat them with respect. In many respects, the original work ethic elevated workers,” she noted.

Cracked Labs’ research highlights how wireless networking, motion sensors, and Bluetooth beacons enable “behavioural monitoring and profiling” in offices. Companies like Spacewell and Locatee offer solutions that track workstation presence, room occupancy, and employee movement, providing employers with real-time and historical data.

The growing interest in “optimised” working environments has fuelled a booming market for employee-monitoring technology. Companies like Logitech offer solutions that track room usage and predict meeting room audience placement, while Cisco Spaces uses wireless infrastructure and linked devices to provide real-time and historical data on employee movement and behaviour.

Concerns about privacy and the potential for misuse of data are rising. While these technologies offer benefits like energy use optimisation and office resource management, they also raise concerns about intrusive monitoring and profiling.

Experts argue that if companies use sensitive data like indoor location tracking, there must be safeguards to prevent its misuse. The lack of federal labour law in this area makes the US a legal anomaly compared to the UK and Europe, where stricter regulations exist.

Employee opposition, union organising, and media publicity have blocked some office monitoring methods. However, the use of surveillance technology in the workplace raises questions about trust, morale, and the balance between productivity and employee privacy.

The debate over workplace surveillance highlights the tension between the desire for efficiency and the need to respect employee privacy and autonomy. As technology continues to advance, it is crucial to find a balance that protects both employer and employee interests.

The post Is your office watching you? appeared first on International Finance.

The majority of offices closed during the good part of the 2020 COVID pandemic. Over 60% of all paid full-day workdays were completed remotely. Jump forward to 2024, employees are hesitant to return. Although it has decreased from its peak in 2020, the percentage of remote work is still quite high at 28%, or over six times that of the pre-pandemic period.

According to a 2023 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), employees who worked from home saved an average of 72 minutes every day by avoiding commuting. Many firms offered remote work options in the tight labour market that followed the first lockdown period to draw in a bigger pool of employment seekers.

Many people are concerned about the future of workplaces due to the prevalence of hybrid work. Some businesses have determined that they require less space than they did before the pandemic since employees are visiting less frequently.

Market observers are trying to forecast where the next crisis might arise and are now concentrating on what this shrinkage means for the commercial real estate (CRE) industry as well as the larger financial system.

Assessing workplace demand

During the pandemic, office security company Kastle started releasing weekly office occupancy statistics based on information from the 2,600 properties it manages. Office occupancy in its top 10 metro areas is about 50%; it is lower on Mondays and Fridays and higher in the middle of the week. The national director of office analytics for CoStar Group, Phil Mobley, reports that a record high of 12.9% of office space is unoccupied.

The CRE technology platform VTS generates a monthly office demand index. The release of COVID-19 vaccinations appeared to be likely to lead to a strong comeback to the office in 2021, which caused the VTS Office Demand Index to spike briefly. However, such hopes were dashed when the delta variant emerged. It has been locked far below its pre-pandemic value since the middle of 2022.

Another measure of the demand for offices in the market is provided by publicly traded office real estate investment trusts or REITs. This is the FTSE National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (NAREIT) for the United States. The Real Estate Index Series monitors the US Properties by kind of REIT. Its office index dropped by 15.9% at the end of March 2023, after falling by 37.6% in 2022. Because of their higher demand, offices owned by publicly traded REITs are sometimes seen as leading indicators for the industry.

Arpit Gupta from New York University, Vrinda Mittal and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh from Columbia University, and others estimated the impact of the pandemic on offices using data from the NAREIT office index and CompStak, a data platform for CRE brokers, in a working paper from September 2022.

To determine the availability and demand for remote employment, they also examined job listings on Ladders, a job search engine that specialises in positions paying more than $100,000 annually. They calculated that a company’s need for office space drops by roughly 4 to 5% points for every 10% increase in the percentage of remote job ads.

However, not all office buildings are seeing such a dramatic decline in demand. Gupta, Mittal, and Van Nieuwerburgh conducted a thorough analysis of the data and discovered that over the previous three years, the highest-class buildings (A+ properties) outperformed others. In a similar vein, the office demand picture presented in a recent report by CRE company Cushman & Wakefield is more nuanced than the sum totals would indicate. In the paper “Obsolescence Equals Opportunity,” it is stated that the market share of office buildings with above 50% vacancy is only 7.5%. Demand for recently constructed, superior office buildings increased throughout the pandemic.

Nevertheless, the authors predict that over the next ten years, there will be 1.1 billion square feet of surplus office space as production outpaces demand. But they only credit the increase in remote work for only 30% of that surplus supply. The remaining amount is the outcome of normal fluctuations in supply and demand as certain buildings age out of the market and businesses modify their space requirements in response to evolving business circumstances.

“Work from home will still have an impact, but it’s not the main factor influencing behaviour at the moment,” says Rebecca Rockey, Cushman & Wakefield’s global head of economic analysis and forecasting, while elaborating, “We’re now coming into what we think is more of a business-cycle driven downturn. Some of the recent weakening in the office market has been tied to the tech sector, which was very aggressive in leasing markets during the pandemic. Now they are scaling back. We are also seeing businesses attempting to cut costs in what is widely viewed as the most well-anticipated recession ever.”

In early 2023, San Francisco-based software corporation Salesforce revealed plans to downsize office space in select locations and lay off 10% of its workers (and they are still firing their staffers). Facebook’s parent company, Meta, also announced in 2024 about cutting jobs and reducing the amount of space it occupies in San Francisco by 435,000 square feet. Additionally, Amazon said in March 2023 that it would stop building its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Demand for office space has historically increased in direct proportion to employment growth in office positions. That link collapsed during the COVID recovery, as the labour market recovered quickly but the return to the workplace happened more gradually.

The Cushman & Wakefield experts predict that after businesses decide on a combination of in-person and remote work, this connection will stabilise. However, going forward, it is likely that less space will be required for each employee than it was before the pandemic.

Which shoe will drop next?

There are signs of an excess of office space shortly, regardless of whether businesses are reducing their requirement for office space as a result of remote work or declining economic conditions.

The law of supply and demand indicates that office building values will decline as a result of this. Gupta, Mittal, and Van Nieuwerburgh projected that by the end of the decade, the office building sector will lose 39% of its value in comparison to 2019 after simulating different scenarios for the continuation of remote work. But offices have other challenges than a lacklustre demand. All long-term investments, including real estate, lose value as interest rates rise.

Refinancing debt becomes more expensive when interest rates rise. Office buildings are usually funded using a combination of debt and equity, just like residential dwellings. Since the average office mortgage lasts for ten years, many of the loans that are about to mature were taken out at a time when interest rates were significantly lower. Simultaneously, a decline in office tenant demand may make it more difficult for landlords to pay off their debt by decreasing rental income. This has raised fears that the financial system may be facing catastrophic consequences in the form of a wave of defaults.

CRE mortgages come from a range of sources and include loans for offices as well as retail, multifamily housing, and other commercial property types.

According to a report by Rich Hill, head of real estate strategy and research for asset management firm Cohen & Steers, banks and thrifts have the greatest proportion, almost 45%.

When construction loans are taken out of the equation, the percentage drops to less than 40%. About 13% of all CRE loans, including loans for building and income-producing properties, are held by the top 25 banks, while their exposure is relatively low (less than 4% of total assets). About 32% of all CRE mortgages are held by regional and community banks outside of the top 25, and these loans typically make up a far larger portion of their assets.

Following Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank’s bankruptcies in March 2023, the banking industry has come under increased scrutiny. CRE loans did contribute to previous banking crises, even though neither of the above failures appears to have been caused by CRE lending.

Research from the Richmond Fed indicates that from 2008 to 2012, banks that had a large percentage of CRE loans were approximately three times as likely to fail as banks throughout the country. Furthermore, banks that extended high-risk loans during the 1980s CRE development boom were more likely to collapse when the decade’s property prices crashed.

The bank’s delinquency rate on CRE loans is still far below 1%, much lower than what was seen during the last two crises. Many observers anticipate that number to increase as more loans become due, but commercial lending requirements are also more stringent now than they were before the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

Compared to the normal residential mortgage, office mortgages often have loan-to-values between 50% and 60%, which indicates the proportion of debt financing to the property value. Office loans account for just 3% of the assets of regional and community banks and less than 17% of the total CRE mortgage market, according to Cohen & Steers’ Hill estimate.

“Commercial real estate assets all have different fundamentals,” Hill states, stating further, “While the office is under pressure, other sectors are doing quite well right now.”

Office buildings that were last financed in 2013 may very well have increased in value even after taking into consideration the recent drop since office mortgages typically have a ten-year term. This implies that a borrower’s equity would not be destroyed by current losses unless they were very significant.

Positive aspects

The worst-case scenario for workplaces depends on the continuation of high levels of remote work arrangements. The model by Gupta, Mittal, and Van Nieuwerburgh includes scenarios in which office valuations recover and the economy returns to a more limited degree of remote labour. Even the most upbeat office champions don’t think that in-person employment will return to its pre-pandemic proportions, but employers’ willingness to accept remote labour is beginning to wane.

Some firms are recognising that remote workers in other nations may be able to complete jobs that Americans can do entirely from home for less money, especially when the labour market softens in some industries. Some have begun to raise the amount of days that staff members are required to physically show up to work. Walt Disney is requesting that employees report to work four days a week, and senior management at JPMorgan Chase was recently informed that they will have to work five days a week. Additionally, some firms, like the New York-based legal firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, have threatened to reduce bonus payments to staff members who disregard in-person responsibilities.

Following Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, the Financial Times’ Tabby Kinder and Antoine Gara revealed that the majority of the 8,500 workers of the bank were working remotely. The absence of coincidental “water cooler” chats might have played a role in the bank’s inability to identify its issues.

Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who has been studying remote work since before the pandemic, informed Kinder and Gara that “ideas like hedging interest rate risk often come up over lunch or in small meetings.”

“I think we’re definitely going to see more of a return to the office, but the way companies and employees want to use the office has changed,” Hill says.

Office owners have other options besides giving up the keys when demand declines. Renovating the area with contemporary facilities and adaptable workspaces intended for a hybrid workforce may be sufficient to win back tenants, depending on the fundamental qualities of the property.

“In terms of reimagining their buildings, adding desired amenities and technology, and creating collaborative areas within the common spaces of the buildings, commercial property owners in Rosslyn have been incredibly innovative,” says Mary-Claire Burick, president of the Rosslyn Business Improvement District, a 17-block mixed-use area in downtown Rosslyn, Virginia, which is located just outside of Washington, D.C.

Some even suggested in the early stages of the COVID that vacant offices might be turned into homes, to help address the chronic lack of affordable housing. It turns out that this is far from simple. Plumbing and window location, for example, are two areas where the standard apartment and office building layouts diverge significantly. Zoning would frequently also need to be altered to permit residential buildings inside commercial offices. Finally, before such a conversion became financially appealing, the price of an office building would need to plummet dramatically because most commercial assets are substantially more expensive than multifamily dwellings.

However, this kind of reuse is feasible, especially with local legislators’ backing. New York City authorities implemented a tax incentive programme to promote the conversion of abandoned Manhattan offices into residential units during the office market collapse of the early 1990s. Between 1995 and 2006, the initiative resulted in the conversion of about 13 million square feet of office space or around 13% of the lower Manhattan market. As a result, around 13,000 new housing units were built, which makes up more than 40% of the increase in lower Manhattan housing between 1990 and 2020. The programme was especially successful in promoting the conversion of older office stock that was constructed before 1945.

Even while offices will encounter many difficulties in the upcoming years, there don’t now seem to be many hazards to the industry as a whole or to bank lenders in particular. Bank authorities; however, appear to be closely monitoring these trends in light of previous crises in which real estate played a significant role. In a speech to the Institute of International Bankers on March 6, Chairman of the FDIC Martin Gruenberg stated that office headwinds’ impact on bank balance sheets was “an area of ongoing supervisory attention.”

“When it comes to managing the fallout, we want to make sure that banks are as well-capitalised as possible,” Van Nieuwerburgh states, while concluding, “One thing we learnt from the subprime crisis is that you don’t want to force all your banks to foreclose on nonperforming loans too quickly. But you also don’t want to make the opposite mistake of extending loans that will never be performing. You want to thread a middle ground.”

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Some employees have expressed that their remote working arrangements have provided them with the flexibility to adjust to other life factors, which has enabled them to perform better. This change marks a departure from Dell’s previous stance on remote work, as CEO Michael Dell himself had previously been an advocate.

In 2022, the company’s CEO Michael Dell said, “At Dell, we found no meaningful differences for team members working remotely or office-based even before the pandemic forced everyone home.”

According to a new policy, employees will be classified into two categories based on their remote work style. The first category is purely remote, which means that they will not be eligible for career advancement opportunities. The second category is hybrid, which requires workers to be present in the office for at least three days a week.

In a memo obtained by Business Insider, Dell has emphasised the importance of face-to-face interactions and has indicated the need for remote workers to switch to hybrid work roles.

On LinkedIn, Michael Dell wrote, “If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organisation, you’re doing it wrong.”

Several employees have expressed their frustration and concern over the new policy to Business Insider, speaking anonymously. They fear that this new policy may lead to job insecurity and will impact their work-life balance, especially for those who live hours away from their office location.

Although Dell is not the only company that has been pushing office-based working since the pandemic, with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and more following suit, this situation highlights an ongoing and unsettled debate about the future of remote work and the effectiveness of working from an office.

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The survey found that IT workers are 1.4 times more likely to ‘silent resign’ than employees in other fields. This is the practice of taking a step back from work to the point that you occasionally accomplish the bare minimum while looking into alternative career paths.

Large-scale tech layoffs are still occurring, though not on the same scale as they were at the start of 2023. For your information, statistics show that this year, over 222,000 tech workers lost their jobs.

Walkouts Might Soon Follow Layoffs

It’s unclear exactly why there will likely be a large exodus of IT workers. Some people might look for a job with more security because they don’t want to live in a situation where they might suffer from the upcoming round of layoffs.

Others are finding it difficult to keep up with the rising expectations as the workforce gets smaller. According to the Ivanti study, over three-quarters (73%) of IT and computer security professionals reported higher workloads, with many of them also reporting burnout.

The fact that four out of five people (84%) said they would like to continue working remotely at least occasionally is another evidence towards this trend. Many businesses have since come out in favour of working from home, going back on their early promises made during the pandemic.

Employees at Google Cloud and Amazon have both expressed dissatisfaction with their respective companies’ revised return-to-office requirements so far this year. Both companies have desk-sharing policies that require employees to work in the office two days per week on alternate days with a coworker.

The study comes at a time when Amazon’s CEO has been asking his staff to come to the office at least three days a week.

Andy Jassy made the statement in an internal meeting in August 2023 where he reportedly expressed his reservation about some of the employees not turning up to the office three days a week, despite that now being Amazon’s official policy.

He said, “It’s past the time to disagree and commit. If you can’t disagree and commit … it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week.”

Jassy’s statement holds significance as in March 2023, Amazon stated about making an additional 9,000 employees redundant, on top of the 18,000 roles it had announced it has been cutting since January. Amazon employs 1.5 million people worldwide.

However, Jassy’s “past the time to disagree” comment comes amid the internal opposition in Amazon against the tougher stance on working from home. Almost 30,000 company staffers signed an internal petition against the return-to-office mandate in May 2023, which read, “Amazon’s top-down, one-size-fits-all RTO [return-to-office] mandate undermines the diverse, accessible future that we want to be a part of.”

Amazon employees also participated in a worldwide walkout to protest the company’s slow progress on climate goals and the return-to-office mandate.

In August 2023, reports surfaced about Amazon workers in the United States being tracked and penalised for not spending sufficient time in the company’s offices.

Amazon had instructed its corporate employees to return to the office three times a week from May 2023, in a reversal from its previous policies that allowed individual teams to decide whether colleagues needed to come into the office or not.

Other tech firms are also cracking down on working from home, including the video call company Zoom, which ironically benefitted immensely from the COVID lockdown-related shift in work culture. The US firm has now asked its staff to come in twice a week, although the policy applies to people living within 50 miles of the office.

Google too has asked its employees to report to the office at least three days a week. Other tech giants like Meta, X and Disney are making reporting to the office a must now.

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A new Slack poll found that over two-thirds of CEOs are under pressure to increase employee productivity.

One may accuse the top business executives of obstinately herding their staffers back to the office like lost sheep, hoping that productivity would magically increase, despite the overwhelming evidence that a flexible hybrid work model is more productive than forced in-office labour for the same tasks.

Decoding the Bureau of Labor Statistics report

The statistics revealed that productivity in the world’s largest economy has plunged by the sharpest rate seen since the 1940s.

Given that productivity grew by 4.3% in the first quarter of 2021, the highest rate the country has seen in years, the latest figure suggests a huge 360* shift in the attitude towards work.

Chief economist at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, Gerald Cohen, suggested tech.co that the productivity boost in 2021 was probably due to the coronavirus recession, as businesses were forced to shift to remote work overnight, but the data also suggests that the switch to remote work was also a success, in terms of increasing the employee productivity.

Myth of the ‘Magical Office’

Many CEOs continue to hold onto the myth that the workplace is the key to productivity, despite the flexible work model proving its worth more than anyone anticipated during the COVID period. They act like the workplace is a vending machine for productivity: insert employees and get more output. However, the evidence paints a different picture.

The office is more like a productivity black hole than a productivity nirvana, where focused work gets dragged into oblivion during collaboration, socializing, mentoring, and on-the-job training flourish.

For instance, a recent study by academics at the University of Iowa, Harvard University, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York discovered that software engineers seated in different buildings on the same campus produced more computer programs than those placed next to colleagues. The engineers that worked in various facilities made fewer comments on each other’s code, though. In other words, they were more productive, but as a result, less seasoned programmers received less mentoring.

Simply put, expecting the workplace to increase productivity is akin to expecting a fish to ride a bicycle. The workplace performs a very different and crucial function. According to the EY-Parthenon study, the forced return to work and declining productivity are directly related. Statistics show that people work longer hours but produce less goods. Therefore, we need to stop attempting to squeeze a square peg into a round hole.

Using structured mentoring to balance work models

While being present in the office reduces productivity, mentoring increases it. However, mentoring requires conscious effort. Unfortunately, many firms have unwritten ideas that if you jam employees into an office like sardines, mentorship will miraculously occur. This haphazard strategy’s effectiveness is comparable to tossing spaghetti at a wall and praying it sticks. Inconsistent, ineffective, and dependent on variables like location, office politics, and human dynamics, office-based mentoring, particularly full-time mentoring, can have a limited influence.

On the other hand, an organized mentoring program provides a more deliberate and successful approach by matching mentors and mentees according to their talents, interests, and goals. With the help of this focused approach, it is made sure that knowledge exchange and personal development are carefully developed and fostered rather than left to chance.

The best elements of both in-office and remote work can coexist in a hybrid workplace where structured mentoring programs can flourish. However, to maximize productivity and employee satisfaction without forgoing the advantages of face-to-face interactions, firms can use this balanced strategy to restrict in-office activities to mandatory mentoring sessions.

Companies can make use of the benefits of both in-office and remote employment in a structured mentorship program. Also, plan targeted in-person mentoring sessions or workshops that respect employees’ need for flexibility in their work schedules while maximizing the advantages of face-to-face contact. When in-person interactions are not necessary, collaborative tools such as video conferencing, instant messaging, and instant messaging can help mentors and mentees communicate.

Moreover, setting clear goals and benchmarks for the mentoring relationship will make both sides more accountable and focused, maximizing the program’s effectiveness. Conventional one-on-one mentoring model can be avoided especially at the time when virtual seminars and forums can offer extra opportunities for knowledge sharing and building connections.

Tracking the development and performance of mentoring relationships allows businesses to pinpoint areas for improvement, hone their program over time, and guarantee its long-term effectiveness. The components that need to be added are autonomy and engagement.

The big irony of the office-centric mindset is that employee engagement and productivity losses suffer. According to a Gallup survey, employees who have the option to work remotely but are required to report to the office experience a lack of autonomy, which lowers engagement.

Consider the effects of this issue on the entire world: Low employee engagement, according to Gallup, cost the world an astounding $7.8 trillion in lost productivity in 2017. To put things into perspective, picture every CEO bashing their company’s piggy bank to pieces with a sledgehammer and then asking themselves why profits are down.

Cognitive biases: The undetected barriers

Cognitive biases frequently influence our decision-making when accepting flexible work and might skew our perception and judgment. Understanding these biases’ effects can help us get past the mental obstacles that stand in the way of productive mentoring. Let’s look at two critical cognitive biases in this situation: the status quo bias and functional fixedness.

Status quo bias is a cognitive bias that makes people choose the current situation over change, even though that change would result in better results. This prejudice may have a significant impact on CEOs’ and executives’ attitudes toward the notion of flexible hybrid work and organized mentoring programs, making them stick with the old-fashioned office-based work style.

Due to their tendency to see change as a danger to the status quo, executives may find it challenging to see the advantages of flexible work arrangements and hybrid mentorship programs. As a result, they might choose to stick with the comfortable office setting rather than consider the research that shows the success of remote work and structured mentoring.

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that keeps people from considering other applications or solutions for a given issue because they are fixated on the conventional or comfortable method. Because they may be unable to see the potential benefits of flexible work and organized hybrid mentorship programs, this prejudice can substantially impact how firms approach workplace efficiency.

The functional fixedness bias may keep leaders firmly convinced that the workplace is the only setting that can foster productivity. As a result, even when given strong proof, individuals could not see the possibilities of flexible work arrangements and hybrid mentorship programs.

Rethinking the workplace: A fresh approach

It’s time for CEOs to embrace the flexible work revolution and jump off the sinking ship of mandated in-office employment. Although cooperation, mentoring, and training can occur in the office, productivity is not one of them.

Let’s create work arrangements specific to each person’s function and preferences rather than putting everyone into the same box. It’s time to quit denying reality and accept that flexible hybrid work is the way of the future and will remain so. The only way to stop the spiralling decline in productivity and unlock the workforce’s full potential is to accept this fact.

It is abundantly evident from the research that returning to work under duress will not improve productivity—instead, it will exacerbate it. As demonstrated over the previous five quarters, forcing staff members back into the office is like beating our heads against a brick wall and expecting a different result. The moment has arrived for CEOs to abandon their antiquated beliefs and embrace the revolution in flexible hybrid employment.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that returning to the office does not increase productivity. The workplace is better suited for collaboration, socializing, and mentoring, while focused work gets dragged into oblivion. Companies must reevaluate their strategies and embrace the flexible work revolution to maximize productivity and employee satisfaction.

Companies can use structured mentoring programs to balance the benefits of both in-office and remote work. It’s time for CEOs to abandon their antiquated beliefs and embrace the revolution in flexible hybrid employment to unlock the workforce’s full potential.

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Squirro’s AI-driven context intelligence and data insights solutions are used by Financial Services (FS) firms all over the world, including organisations such as Wells Fargo, Investec and SwissRE. The Singapore office will be Squirro’s fifth, with offices in three European locations and its US HQ in New York.

This latest international expansion is the first since Squirro finalised a $10 million Series B funding round in July 2017, with investors including Orange Growth Capital and Salesforce Ventures.

“Our continued international expansion reflects the growing maturity of AI and machine learning, technologies that are finally starting to deliver on the promise and hype,” said Dr Dorian Selz, CEO at Squirro. “Opportunities for financial services in the APAC region are growing as FinTechs take the lead. Technology has created an ongoing evolution in the industry, a shift from traditional financial services to financial technology. Squirro’s technology, particularly our new advanced AI platform TRINITY, addresses the challenges of dealing with 99% of the company data that is not addressed and provides FS firms with far greater customer knowledge than they have ever had.”

More than 200 banks have a presence in Singapore, and with the 2013 appointment of a Renminbi (RMB) clearing bank, financial institutions in Singapore have been able to play a significant role in bridging trade and investment flows between China and other countries.

“Not only is Singapore one of the world’s most prominent financial centres, it’s really where much of the region’s growth is. Furthermore, it is incredibly well connected across the rest of South East Asia,” continued Selz. “Singapore was therefore the obvious choice when it came to launching Squirro’s first office in Asia. It gives us the perfect platform to work with FS firms in Singapore and the rest of the APAC region.”

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The funding comprises an initial tranche of $70 million from the principal behind a Saudi Arabian family office. Additional tranches from a consortium of investors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are expected to be completed later in 2017, subject to regulatory approvals, giving Divisa Capital over $100 million in cash to fund its long-term expansion plans.

Divisa Capital will use the new funds to boost its Prime Brokerage relationships and other bilateral partnerships offering clients enhanced liquidity along with introducing new products and services.

Mushegh Tovmasyan, CEO of Divisa Capital, said, “Over the past eight years, Divisa Capital has established itself as the brokerage of choice for a diverse range of institutional and professional clients. We are now ready to expand our capital base in readiness for the next phase of the company’s journey. Our ability to attract investment of this scale speaks volumes for Divisa Capital’s market position and future outlook”.

Established in 2008, Divisa Capital provides bespoke Forex and contracts for difference (CFD) liquidity to institutions and professional traders, and has a track record in the space of FinTech and innovation. It has registered offices in the UK, US, New Zealand and Armenia, and is the official Foreign Exchange Partner of the Premier League’s Watford Football Club.

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The national vacancy rate, which stood at 15.9% in the previous quarter, has now fallen to 15.4%

Asking rent grew by 0.3 percent while effective rent rose by 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter, according to the report.

In the third quarter, asking rent for the sector grew by 0.3 percent while effective rent rose by 0.4 percent.

In the second quarter, asking and effective rent had risen 0.6 percent.

Construction activity rose from the third quarter, with 8.53 million square feet of new office construction completed.

The recent employment growth should pull the vacancy rate down further in 2017 while rent growth should accelerate back towards a 3 percent annual growth rate, the firm stated.

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October 14, 2016: In a decisive move, UK-based VST Enterprises has announced the addition of two former Elavon Vice Presidents to its business development arm in the US.

Joseph Cohane, ex Executive Vice President, and Stephanie Sharp, ex Vice President and Controller of the leading payment processor, bring more than 40 years of combined payments expertise and will be specialising in the financial transactions and fraud prevention functionality of VST Enterprises’ award-winning scanable symbol technology, VCode.

Designed and developed by entrepreneurial partners Louis-James Davis and Andy Giblin, the versatile VCode technology is currently being utilised across many sectors, from document verification, to unattended car park payment systems, and interactive charitable giving transactions.

Cohane said, “I am very pleased to be joining VST Enterprises. My experience tells me that this business is one of few start-ups operating in the authentication space that has the genuine capability to transform lives, and unite security protocol across verticals. I am very excited to be able to play a part in its success.”

Sharp said, “VCode presents a solution to security and authentication issues that continue to hinder the next generation of financial technology. The business is committed to international expansion. So it will be really interesting to see the impact it has on the global payments arena. I have no doubt that this will just be the beginning of even bigger things to come from the team.”

The announcement comes on the back of the news that the company has opened an office in New York, and will be opening a second office in the US in Reno later this year.

Louis-James Davis, chief executive and founder of VST Enterprises, says, “The addition of Joseph and Stephanie comes at a very important stage in our company’s progression. It marks further expansion to the US and demonstrates our commitment to being experts in our vertical markets, such as payments.

“We’ve come an incredibly long way in such a short amount of time. I believe this is due to the growing need for a solution like VCode in the market. We’re delighted to be taking the next step towards offering our scanable, secure image technology to a global and varied customer base.”

The proprietary VCode app is compatible with iOS and Android smart phones and tablets and, unlike traditional bar or QR codes, VCodes can be scanned from any screened media, from distances of up to 100m and virtually any angle. Furthermore, each code is completely unique to eliminate the problem of mainstream counterfeiting.

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August 17, 2016: Big data analytics firm Hello Soda has cemented its international presence with the opening of a new US office.

Located in Austin, Texas, the new office will help Hello Soda service its growing US client base as well as providing a platform for further expansion. The downtown office, based in Austin’s financial district, will be headed up by international strategies director Ben Allott who has been part of Hello Soda since its conception three years ago.

As a big data analytics firm, Hello Soda’s unique proposition revolves around PROFILE, its unstructured data analytics platform which enables businesses across a range of sectors to gain meaningful insights from unstructured data, revolutionising the way they work. PROFILE is utilised to verify ID and detect fraud, asses risk and increase financial inclusion, and to personalise the user experience by delivering insights that traditional data doesn’t cover, helping brands to engage with consumers on a one-to-one level.

The new US office follows Hello Soda’s recent expansion in Manchester, UK, with recruitment already underway for multiple sales roles as well as a new office manager. With its international headquarters in Manchester and offices in Bangkok, the office launch firmly establishes Hello Soda as a global, 24-hour business.

Ben Allott, international strategies director, said: “There is substantial appetite for Hello Soda’s offering in the US where we’ve been doing business for some time. A total of 50% of our revenue is already being generated in the US and we’re forecasting treble digit growth over the next 18 months. It’s a very exciting time for Hello Soda and we look forward to embarking on this new chapter which will demonstrates our commitment to the US market.”

James Blake, founder and CEO of Hello Soda, added: “When we started up the business in 2013, we recognised the potential that big data analytics held and knew we could play a pivotal part in the FinTech revolution. Now, just three years on, our international presence has been fully cemented and we operate around the globe 24 hours a day.”

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