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3.5 days in the office is the new hybrid-work sweet spot

By
Peter Vanham
Peter Vanham
and
Nicholas Gordon
Nicholas Gordon
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By
Peter Vanham
Peter Vanham
and
Nicholas Gordon
Nicholas Gordon
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July 13, 2023, 5:38 AM ET
Updated July 13, 2023, 5:52 AM ET
Young japanese businesswoman video conferencing with colleagues on laptop in hybrid office. Startup entrepreneur having a video call with team.
New McKinsey research suggests the RTO battle is over. Getty Images
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Good morning from Geneva. 

The war over remote vs. in-office work is over, and hybrid has won. 

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That’s the conclusion of a new McKinsey report, out today; CEO Daily got a sneak preview. 

“Three and a half days in the office. That’s where we think the convergence will roughly happen,” Jan Mischke, one of the report’s authors, told me. “There will be a lot of movement still” before we settle on that number, he added, and it could be 3.9 or 3.2. “But it’s unlikely to be five days and unlikely to be two days.” 

This surprised me, since corporate leaders—from Wall Street to Silicon Valley—have been so vocal in calling their workers back to the office full-time. But according to Mischke, that’s more a reflection of where these companies are coming from than a sign of where they are going. “[These firms] have the lowest attendance today,” he said. “They are the epitome of remote.”  

JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, for example, may go back to five days in the office, but the rest of us won’t. Credit the segment of the population that is “extremely adamant” about being hybrid, Mischke said. The biggest advocates of the model may not be who you’d expect. “It’s the senior executive that comes in three to four days a week. They think they are more productive at home one to two days a week.”

The consequences for superstar cities like New York, San Francisco, and London are profound. “We’re going into a world where city centers will become much more mixed-use,” Mischke said. For central business districts, building conversion won’t be easy, nor cheap, “but it has to happen for 10-20% of the properties.” Companies, for their part, “will need to upgrade the quality of the office space” and “make it much more adaptable.” 

McKinsey

The primary function of an office, Mischke concluded, should be to meet other people. I would agree. And I’d even venture to say that’s true about shared spaces in general. 

Separately, have a read of this opinion piece by Michael Bush, CEO of Great Place to Work, titled, “‘It’s time to acknowledge why diversity makes us uncomfortable.” “Facing issues related to race in this country is very hard, or perhaps, impossible,” he writes. But if companies want to build trust, they need to address it.

More news below.   

Peter Vanham
peter.vanham@fortune.com
@petervanham

TOP NEWS

Iger extension

Disney CEO Bob Iger will stay in his role for an extra two years after the entertainment company’s board unanimously voted to extend his contract through 2026. Iger returned to Disney last November replacing his erstwhile successor, Bob Chapek. Disney is struggling with high streaming costs, disappointing releases, and blowback from conservative politicians. CNN

Google training

Thousands of contractors, making as little as $14 per hour and with minimal training, are trying to keep Google’s chatbot Bard accurate. These Google contractors sometimes have to judge the accuracy of Bard’s answers in as little as three minutes. "People are scared, stressed, underpaid, don’t know what’s going on,” one contractor said. Bloomberg

A.I. spam

Spammers are inundating digital publishers with low-quality, A.I.-generated articles as chatbots make it easier to generate copy. Other websites are using A.I. to write news articles—often including errors—to make a quick buck from digital advertising. Researchers now worry about “model collapse,” as A.I. models trained on A.I.-generated writing produce even worse writing. The Wall Street Journal

AROUND THE WATERCOOLER

Too many CEOs don’t know what their workers need. Employee ‘engagement’ surveys can make the problem even worse by Phil Wahba

Harvard ’21 grad says Gen Z just uses A.I. to do their homework, they ‘aren’t necessarily interested in using ChatGPT for learning’ by Paolo Confino

Jack Ma was once Asia’s richest person—but he’s lost more than half of his $61 billion fortune in the past 3 years by Chloe Taylor 

Rise of the Chinese yuan: The dollar doesn’t have quite the pull it used to, S&P’s chief economist says by Eleanor Pringle 

Commentary: ‘The Feckless 400’: These companies are still doing business in Russia–and funding Putin’s war by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian

This edition was CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon.

This is the web version of CEO Daily, a newsletter of must-read insights from Fortune CEO Alan Murray. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.

About the Authors
By Peter VanhamEditorial Director, Leadership
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Peter Vanham is editorial director, leadership, at Fortune.

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Nicholas Gordon
By Nicholas GordonAsia Editor
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Nicholas Gordon is an Asia editor based in Hong Kong, where he helps to drive Fortune’s coverage of Asian business and economics news.

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