Boeing Plans To End Hybrid Work Schedules
Boeing plans to require its employees to return to the office on a pre-pandemic schedule of five days a week, the Seattle Times reports.
No timetable for the shift away from hybrid work schedules has been announced, but reportedly managers are already discussing the matter with workers and the change may come as soon as after the holidays.
Word came down recently from Stan Deal, executive vice president of the Boeing Co. and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, who told managers to require full-time on-site attendance, according to the Times.
“Over the past two years, we have transitioned more employees to work in the office and are asking all Boeing Commercial Airplane employees to return to our pre-pandemic policy,” a spokesperson told Bisnow by email Monday.
“As we continue to hire new employees and continue our airplane development work, it’s beneficial to have teams in the office more often to support our customer commitments and collaborate in person, including sharing best practices and responding promptly to emergent needs. Often there’s no substitute for face-to-face collaboration and communication.”
Boeing employs more than 156,000 people worldwide, with the largest concentration in Washington. More than 60,000 Boeing workers are in Washington, mostly in greater Seattle, where the company maintains its main manufacturing hub.
Other states with large concentrations of Boeing workers are Missouri, where 15,700 Boeing employees work, California with more than 13,600, and South Carolina and Texas with more than 6,000 each.
If implemented, the change would represent a 180-degree policy reversal for the aerospace giant where hybrid schedules have been the norm since the beginning of the pandemic, Fortune reports.
Mandating a full return to office has been a tough slog for employers, as employees who have grown fond of hybrid schedules have pushed back against it in the years since widespread vaccination against Covid-19.
“Working from home is here to stay. I can prove it with data — lots and lots of data showing that returning to the office (R.T.O.) is D.O.A.,” wrote Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, in the New York Times in October.
“Employees equate a mix of working in the office and working from home to an 8% raise,” Bloom noted. “They don’t have to deal with the daily hassle and costs of a commute.”
The move by Boeing comes at a time when more workers are back in the office than at any time since the pandemic started, according to the most recent report from Kastle.
The Kastle Back to Work Barometer, which tracks office occupancies in 10 major U.S. metro markets, came in at 51.6% occupancy as of Dec. 6. This is the highest the metric has reached since early 2020.
