Business
The Standard compiled a list of the return-to-office policies at public companies headquartered in San Francisco and the news for the local economy isn't pretty.
Before the pandemic, revenues generated by office life accounted for 75% of the city’s gross domestic product. The full impact of work-from-home policies on San Francisco’s finances is not yet known but is expected to be quite substantial—The Standard’s research shows that over half of the city’s large public companies intend to allow their employees to work remotely for the foreseeable future, and SF has the lowest share of workers returning to the office among 10 major metro areas tracked by Kastle Systems swipe-card data.
One major reason for the weak return-to-office numbers is the city’s dependence on software companies, many of which were the first to declare they were going “remote-first.”
"The rise of tech succeeded fantastically but ironically put us in a more difficult position with the pandemic," said Wade Rose, president of Advance SF, which represents some of San Francisco's largest employers. "It was totally impossible to predict, but here it is. There’s been a massive upset to normal economic behavior."
The public companies in the tracker below employ at least 83,000 people who used to come regularly to offices in San Francisco, which represents about 20% of all the office workers in the city.
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