The dust from an acrimonious United Auto Workers strike may have settled, but General Motors is now directing its attention to its corporate staff with a directive that they must report to the office at least three days a week.
The multinational automaker is calling on employees who live within 50 miles of a GM office to adhere to the new policy, the company confirmed to CoStar News. The requirement reverses GM's earlier guidance that employees should "work appropriately" in the office or out, depending on where they could best achieve their goals.
The shift is the latest indicator of the dwindling patience many employers have for flexible work schedules adopted in the early months of the pandemic.
“Effective January 8, 2024, we are providing more clarity on our three-day-a-week return to office policy. Hybrid employees need to be in the office Tuesday through Thursday in order to meet critical business needs and retain company culture,” Detroit-based GM said in a statement.
The new mandate is not GM's first attempt to get office employees back in their chairs. The company last year tried to persuade workers to make the commute voluntarily, but like other companies struggling to refill their sparsely staffed offices, employees pushed back and sterner action was delayed.
The return-to-office mandate is estimated to impact about 43,500 of GM's salaried workers located across the United States.
Mixed Response
In a company-wide email to employees, earlier reported by Bloomberg, CEO Mary Barra wrote that in-person work was critical to helping the company achieve some of its ambitious goals, including its push for more electric vehicle launches.
"At the start of the year, we asked hybrid employees to be in the office three days a week in order to drive the greatest impact. However, adherence has been mixed," Barra wrote in the email. "We are now explicitly requesting hybrid employees to be onsite beginning Jan. 8, every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at minimum. Senior leaders will continue to have the flexibility to determine if a team needs to be in the office more frequently."
Once enacted, the policy means GM will join a roster of other corporate giants across the U.S. in pushing to enforce stricter in-office schedules. Disney, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Alphabet's Google and others have ramped up efforts to get workers back to physical office space, deploying a mix of strategies that include attendance-tracking apps or threats to link in-person time with annual performance reviews.
Even so, the escalated in-office mandates have yet to significantly move the needle on occupancy rates nationally, as office use remains stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels in major metropolitan areas around the country, according to data tracked by Kastle Systems and its office entry-card-swipe systems.
What's more, softened demand has pushed the national office vacancy rate beyond 13.5% nationally, according to a CoStar analysis. Tenants now have collectively dumped nearly 175 million square feet of office space onto the market since the beginning of 2020, according to the data, much of which has been concentrated in major office markets such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.
"We realize 'return to the office' is a topic that has been highly debated in many workplaces around the country," Barra wrote. "It is also something the [senior leadership team] feels strongly about, and we want to make our expectations clear. We believe the benefits of in-person collaboration and mentorship lead to a stronger, more innovative culture and higher performance."