Remote work is losing its grip on SF, at last

On a recent weekday afternoon, the sky was drizzly and overcast, but the energy buzzed at the Salesforce Park location of Andytown Coffee.

Colleagues gossiped, headphone-clad people tapped furiously at laptops, and one group quietly discussed possible valuations for an impending funding round. The line for a latte or croissant held steady.  

It’s a different world from when Andytown reopened its downtown location in late 2021. At the time, the café was “absolutely dead,” according to owner Lauren Crabbe. In the following months, foot traffic returned in fits and starts — then all at once. 

“Last fall, it just skyrocketed,” she said. “All of a sudden it was like, OK, we’re back.” 

Crabbe’s experience reflects a larger vibe shift in the city where remote work had firmly embedded itself in recent years. Blue-chip private employers, a growing swath of the public sector, and hardcore AI startups have converged to bring workers back to the office in a kind of cultural squeeze.

Nearly everyone agrees that the hope for a complete return to the Before Times is a lost cause. But it’s clear from speaking to members of the business ecosystem — HR managers, sellers of office furniture, grumbling employees, headhunters, and small companies like Andytown — that something has changed. Five years after Covid shut down the city, it seems we’re at the beginning of the end of the remote-work era. 

The café in October matched pre-pandemic revenue, and, aside from a holiday lull, business has been steady or growing since. It’s a sign of a palpable resurgence in parts of the city, where working from the office has become the new new normal. 

“All of a sudden, the hoodies came back; the North Face jackets are back,” Crabbe said. “On a day where we have nice weather, it’s wild. Everyone’s coming in.”

The push for workers to return to offices is the agenda du jour at the local, state, and federal levels. Within days of each other, Mayor Daniel Lurie and Gov. Gavin Newsom followed the lead of President Donald Trump in ordering government workers back to their desks more frequently — making getting butts in seats a rare point of agreement between the two parties.

The city is “noticing an exciting resurgence of energy,” said Rodney Fong, president of the Chamber of Commerce, and is “thrilled to welcome more workers, visitors, and residents back.” (Though mounting recession fears could hamper hopes for a full bounce-back.) 

For those resistant to returning to an office, the dream of a fully work-from-home job has been supplanted by gratitude if their company requires an in-office presence only twice a week. But in most cases, the requirement is three days, or even four or five.

“Two years ago, I could not get anybody to go into the office a couple days a week,” said Jaimie Feliz, principal at San Francisco recruiting firm The Hire Standard. “Now, across the board, it’s pretty standard for companies to ask for a minimum of three days in office — it’s very rare to see any less than that.”

San Francisco has been the slowest metropolitan area to return to offices since pandemic restrictions started to lift, lagging behind New York and Washington and pushing the local office market to a 36.5% vacancy rate. 

But office visits have been on the rise in San Francisco since October, according to tracking firm Placer.ai, which analyzes foot traffic at office buildings around the country. In January, visits were up 3.1% in the year from the year before, unlike in most other major metros, thanks in part to our classically temperate weather. (Though February saw a small dip in San Francisco and across the board.)

Meanwhile, 79% of respondents in a recent KPMG survey of 100 local business leaders said they are trying to bring employees back to the office more frequently.

“In the last four or five months, there’s been more of an effort and expectation that return to office is happening,” said Wes Powell, executive managing director at real estate firm JLL. “The pendulum, I think, is swinging almost all the way back.” 

Nationally, the number of work-from-home days has stabilized around 25%. Locally, weekday Muni ridership is up; BART has steadily increased year-over-year as well. Bay Bridge traffic in January was at 90% of 2019 levels. Commuters are back to complaining about people wearing backpacks on packed trains. 

San Francisco office leasing and return-to-office rates have both increased, and while there are still many vacancies, space in premium locations and buildings with nice amenities is being snapped up quickly, according to Powell. 

He points to 555 Mission St., which has nearly 90% occupancy and is about to open an amenities floor that includes a fitness center with Peloton bikes and sauna, a lounge with food and drinks by Wolfgang Puck, a golf simulator, and meeting rooms. It was an $11 million investment by the building’s owner — a sign of money flowing into the office market again. 

Companies are signing big leases and expecting employees to actually work out of the new spaces. Mandates are coming from corporate giants like Amazon and unicorn upstarts like Databricks. Kyle Kovac, a San Francisco office building sales broker at CBRE, said the shift has started to permeate his meetings with major investors.

“One hundred percent, things are starting to change,” Kovac said. “It’s one of the only things that everyone from local, state, to federal officials seem to agree on.”

Kovac said the general consensus among CEOs is they want workers back in the office with greater frequency, but it’s been a difficult tightrope to negotiate. He joked that a “hot mic” moment featuring JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s expletive-laden defense of in-office work was a blessing in disguise in publicizing the backroom conversations.  

While remote-first teams are still out there, Feliz, the recruiter, said those roles tend to be highly competitive — and offer lower salaries.

The end of the remote-work era has left employees on the back foot. Fears that layoffs will continue have spooked some would-be quitters. “Never in my life did I think I’d see these kinds of massive tech layoffs,” said Feliz, noting that “working for Google used to be like working for the government” in terms of job stability. These days, workers at both are on the chopping block. 

Even among city workers, whose powerful unions have been able to enshrine remote work in their contracts, labor leaders decided against pushing back publicly on Lurie’s four-day-a-week mandate amid a major budget deficit and anxiety around potential layoffs.

“I’ve seen candidates who were specifically looking for remote-only work — top, top candidates — and they’re still unemployed,” Feliz said. There’s been a shift in expectations in job-seekers from fully remote to two days a week in the office to conceding to a job that requires three. 

Five-day mandates are still rare, she said, and the key for most companies is to allow employees flexibility.

That’s the stance favored by Adyen, the fintech company that last year signed one of the city’s largest leases. The firm expects its local employees to spend the “majority of their time in the office,” chief HR officer Brooke Nayden said. But while that’s the default, the company has exceptions, just as it did before the pandemic, like if employees work from home around a doctor’s appointment or want to adjust hours for child care. 

Nayden sees having a bustling, energetic office as helpful for hiring, especially among younger people. “It has been a bit of a competitive advantage for us,” she said. 

Nayden has been at Adyen’s Amsterdam headquarters since 2021, but on her frequent visits back to San Francisco, she has found that the area around the office has finally turned a corner, too. While she could once breeze into her favorite Japanese lunch spot, she had to wait 15 minutes to get a seat in January.

“Each time I go back to San Francisco, it’s a bit more alive,” she said. 

Lending Club, which has an office at 595 Market St., has made an effort to make its three-day-a-week mandate (up from two days last year) not just tolerable but fun. 

Management brings in therapy dogs, doughnuts, and snow cones, and last week its building hosted a puppy rescue party that had employees squealing with delight and taking selfies. 

“You can get people excited with food and with dogs,” said Tina Wilson, Lending Club’s chief people officer. “It’s important to add a layer for folks that gets them out of their chairs and gives them those social moments that they don’t usually get at home.” 

When Amazon this year mandated five days a week in the office, its facilities managers in San Francisco reportedly had to scramble to find enough desks. 

The push to bring back employees has indeed created cascading benefits for office furniture dealers and other ancillary businesses. 

Better Source is a 20-year-old Bay Area firm that brings in liquidation items from offices that have either downsized or closed and resells them at a discount. The company’s 50,000-square-foot showroom in Hayward is packed, “Tetris”-style, with filing cabinets, cubicles, desks, and the ever-popular Herman Miller Aeron chairs. Especially in demand? Phone booths. 

“They’re the hottest things,” said Better Source co-owner Darryl Denny. “We can’t keep them in our warehouse.” 

Business was up about 20% last year, and he expects sales to increase through 2025. 

A company called Room, which creates phone booths and soundproof pods, has sold more than 5,000 units to some 1,000 Bay Area customers, according to a spokesperson, to help companies replicate the privacy of the work-from-home experience.

David Liu, owner of sushi spot Ebiko at 100 First St., said it’s been nice to have a lunch rush downtown again. “Since September, it’s definitely gotten busier,” he said. “We see more and more regulars, and the vibe is just more lively.” 

From opening at 11 a.m. until around 1 p.m., Ebiko sees a steady stream of people picking up containers of unagi nigiri or spicy salmon rolls, and the line tends to stretch out the door — at least mid-week. 

One stark trend in this new era is that Mondays and Fridays tend to be slower and quieter, he said. Andytown’s Crabbe agrees, adding that holiday weekends or bad weather can cause wild downturns in business. 

These days, only about 20% of tech companies have a completely remote option, according to data aggregator TrueUp. While most local firms have embraced their three days in the office, a handful continue to evangelize a remote-first identity.

One key example is Airbnb, which renewed a 10-year-lease in SoMa late last year. 

“The best talent in the world doesn’t live within a proximate distance of 888 Brannan St. in San Francisco,” said Iain Roberts, global head of employee experience, who lives in Marin County. 

The company allows employees to work from anywhere while regularly bringing them into an office to collaborate on “hard questions.” This approach yielded Airbnb its highest employee engagement score in years in 2024, according to internal surveys, with no drop in productivity.

Flying employees into SF more frequently did require balance sheet rejiggering, though. “We’ve had to fundamentally think about how we build budgets differently to support a slightly increased amount of travel,” Roberts said.  

Pinterest, which has subleased a chunk of its former office space to Adyen, has a “PinFlex” policy that lets employees work from anywhere and primarily uses its remaining space for in-person events, like pop-ups and conferences. Workers can come in whenever they want, but there are no regular requirements. (The company says 66% of Bay Area-based employees visit the office at least once a month, and 34% come in a couple of times a month). 

Both Airbnb and Pinterest cite their remote-first policies for helping them lure talent. At-home work has been shown to particularly benefit people with disabilities, as well as caregivers.  

“PinFlex is a clear advantage for Pinterest — something candidates have told us directly,” said Sara Phillips-Broadhurst, senior director of people strategy and innovation. The policy has also helped with “boosting productivity, fostering more collaboration, and enhancing well-being,” she added. 

Ultimately, some kind of compromise that balances plenty of in-office collaboration with a dose of telecommuting is the best policy for most companies, according to Nick Bloom, a Stanford University economics professor who has become a kind of remote-work guru. He argues that both workers and employees win with a hybrid schedule that includes two days at home — in other words, mostly in-person, but not to an extreme. 

For Lending Club, the equation makes sense. “It’s about finding what works for the company,” Wilson said, “but then also providing some flexibility to employees.”