No mayor in modern times has a closer relationship with the private sector than Daniel Lurie.
He nurtured it at his former job as a nonprofit funder and also as ringleader of the Super Bowl-supporting Bay Area Host Committee. And now he’s the driving force behind various efforts to raise money from businesspeople, including the Partnership for San Francisco, a consortium of 30 CEOs and executives providing advice and support to his efforts to remake the city; the San Francisco Downtown Development Corp., which aims to fund revitalization projects; and a still-nascent effort to get wealthy donors to pay for shelter beds.
Now Lurie needs to deliver a simple message to his corporate pals: Do as I’ve already done, and mandate that your employees be back in the office four days a week. And those recalcitrant business leaders — who uniformly claim to want San Francisco to return to pre-pandemic normalcy — need to step up.
So far, they’re falling way short. The Standard reached out to all the companies whose CEOs or top executives are members of the Partnership for SF to ask about their return-to-work policies. A smattering have adopted RTO policies that mirror Lurie’s mandate that city workers show up at least four days a week. These include apparel giant Gap, the Golden State Warriors, Jony Ive’s design shop LoveFrom, and several financial firms. However, the overwhelming majority require less of their workers, as seen in the chart below.
Most Partnership members’ companies have some kind of hybrid policy that typically maxes out at three days a week, often depending on the whim of individual team managers. Alphabet and Salesforce, for example, use a hybrid strategy with multiple variables. Visa, OpenAI, Sephora, Levi Strauss, and DocuSign all require just three days a week, or less.
“We expect employees to be in the office three days a week, specifically Tuesday through Thursday at Mission Rock, at a minimum,” a Visa representative said. OpenAI, whose CEO, Sam Altman, was a member of Lurie’s transition team, reported: “We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.” As for Levi’s, the source of the mayor’s great wealth, it mandates “at least three days a week in the office: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.”
Three days or fewer simply isn’t good enough. If the city has a shot at regaining its vibrancy, its biggest employers must require that their workers commit at least as much as its public servants (Governor Gavin Newsom made the four-day-a-week call for state workers in March), not to mention their retail- and other service-oriented colleagues and customers who never had the option of not showing up to work in person. (This seems like a good place to note that The Standard requires its staffers to be in our plant- and snack-filled office four days per week — every day but Wednesday.)
Lurie, who asked his own staff and all department heads to be in the office Monday to Friday from his first day in office, gets this. That’s why he called for all city workers to show up to their jobs in person four days a week back in February. (Labor unions have succeeded in delaying the rollout of this policy until August.)
But unfortunately, Lurie doesn’t seem to be willing to jawbone the private sector into following his lead. So far, he is sticking with the stance he took in his inaugural speech: “My job is not to demand that the private sector be back in the office every day,” he stated back in January. “My job is to make you want to be downtown again.”
I applauded that line then. But now it’s time for Lurie to do more. Through his hospitality zones, power washing of sidewalks, triage centers for people with addiction, relentless open-for-business cheerleading, and, yes, city government back-to-office mandates, Lurie has begun to do his bit to improve downtown.
Lurie needs to use his bully pulpit — and warm relations with the corporate crowd — to encourage them to do more.
Downtown feels a bit livelier and cleaner these days. BART trips ending there are inching up, though still just 37% of pre-pandemic levels. Still, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Data the city tracks from Kastle Systems shows that weekly average office attendance is at 42% of where it was before COVID hit, compared with 50% in San Jose and 54% in New York. None of this should come as a surprise, especially if San Francisco’s biggest, most renowned, and supposedly most committed companies aren’t requiring at least four-day-a-week attendance.
Lurie, who has focused on encouraging these companies to want to be in the city, needs to use his bully pulpit — and warm relations with the corporate crowd — to encourage them to do more.
The best place to start is with the Partnership itself, a group Lurie helped will into existence earlier this year. It is modeled on the decades-old Partnership for New York City, a membership-only group of New York business honchos that advises, conducts research on behalf of, and advocates for that city’s mayor.
San Francisco’s version counts corporate luminaries like DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Alphabet President Ruth Porat, and Visa CEO Ryan McInerney as board members. Yet not one of their companies requires its employees to be in the office four days a week.
The Partnership, which held its initial organizational meetings with Lurie on March 28 and April 2, hasn’t staked out a public position on return-to-office policies. “I don’t have any information to share currently,” Katherine August-deWilde, the group’s president and CEO, emailed me.
While finance companies like JP Morgan Chase, Dodge & Cox, and Sixth Street have followed their industry’s norm by requiring workers to appear in the office four or five days a week, few other major San Francisco companies have followed suit.
One exception is Gap, which announced in February it would require a full in-office workweek beginning in September. That’s a smart way to give employees plenty of time to change their living arrangements, notably tied to the beginning of the school year.
Employers have all sorts of valid reasons for wanting to be flexible with their employees, many of whom obviously love the convenience of working from wherever they like. Moreover, San Francisco’s civic leadership understands downtown may never be exactly the same as it was. This is why, for example, government and the private sector leaders are trying to make it easier to convert older office buildings into apartments.
The fact remains that the most important way to pump up downtown is to fill it with people, particularly office workers who eat lunch, belly up to bars, and shop in stores. If the city’s leading companies won’t do their share, who will?
Additional reporting by Ella Chakarian