Average weekly - 52%
Peak Day - Wednesday 66%
Slow Day - Monday 29%
Attendance Mondays started to outperform Friday in June and is continuing to build while Fridays are actually seeing a reduction. Wednesdays are clearly becoming the busiest day while overall attendance continues to climb and has topped 50% for the last 9 weeks.
This may indicate that the default remote days Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were driven by employees’ desires. Employers’ concerns over training and employed advancement is not meeting pre-COVID levels. One reason is the poor presence of senior mentors throughout the week. Employers are also concerned that new employees are not being onboarded with the right message, a default to remote work by the employee. The result senior people are being asked to come in more often and at least once on a Monday and occasionally Friday.
Summer is usually a slow time for attendance in the office due to holidays, but again we have not yet seen a significant drop yet.
The next Index is scheduled for week of Aug 14th, 2023.
Your SRRA Team,
Links to Articles of Interest
Solid Progress on a Return to the Office in New York?
New reports sponsored by the real estate board in New York suggest that more workers are forming predictable patterns of behaviour that result in the same people coming in at the same times (Tuesday through Thursday) on a regular basis. Although still below pre-pandemic levels, observers see these new data as promising in the slog to sustain the downtown economy.
Doom and Gloom for the TTC with No Prospects for More Funding
This historical perspective traces some of the political choices made in recent decades up to the present to destabilize the TTC’s ability to maintain its previously stellar reputation for reliable, safe, well-maintained operations. Add a bucket of salt perhaps but there is no denying that the corporation has seen better days.
https://torontolife.com/deep-dives/who-broke-the-ttc-inside-torontos-public-transit-disaster/
Time is Money – Shopify Aims to Help Staff Get Serious About Avoiding Unnecessary Meetings
Although Canadians are justly proud of Shopify’s great leap forward in recent years, the fact that most of Shopify’s revenue comes from outside Canada is not well known. One of the driving forces behind the company’s rapid growth is that, with some exceptions, Shopify has relied on virtual connectivity among its internal networks. To ensure that productivity is front and centre to everything its employees do – regardless of which country or countries meeting participants are connecting from – their COO has created a handy calculator tool to emphasize that time is money when it comes to organizing effective meetings. “No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner,” Nejatian said in an interview. “But lots and lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision. The goal of this thing is to show you that time is money. If you have to spend it, you think about it.” Another little-known innovation introduced in May is that the company is piloting a return to the office experiment in its remaining Toronto space. Could the pendulum be swinging back to an appreciation of the benefits of collaborating in person? Stay tuned for more on that one.
Remote Work Crackdown in U.S. Linked to Uptick in Office Leasing
Reports from Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal suggest that American companies are pushing employees to commit to spending more time in the office. As this coincides with increased leasing activity many observers are hoping the link may be causal. “In the past few months, language from employers has gotten steadily tougher regarding their preference for staff to work in person, The Wall Street Journal reported. Anecdotal reports from executives and hiring firms about remote work resulting in decreased productivity now have empirical support from government statistics.”
McKinsey Report Suggests that Hybrid Work Will Drain Value from Office Portfolios
A new report from management consultants McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the valuation of office portfolios in some of the world’s ‘superstar’ cities could suffer as a result of remote working trends. Toronto was not one of the cities in the survey.
Will the East Crosstown Eventually Become Toronto’s Answer to TOD?
Well-known urban development analyst Stephen Velasco has created a 3-D visualization showing what 30,000 residential units proposed in the Golden Mile area might look like in a corridor that, engineering gods willing, will one day be served by five stations of the Crosstown. With another 9000 units proposed around a GO station further south, these hi-rise neighbourhoods could transform Scarborough but also change the dial on whether TOD can be driven by policy changes.
https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2023/07/toronto-entirely-new-skyline/
Shifting Sands in the Office Leasing Business
Landlords have traditionally looked at the financial health of prospective tenants before agreeing to leasing terms, but in the U.S it seems that tenants are now demanding the same right of inspection to determine the long-term viability of landlords – even those with institutional backing.
Amazon’s Push to Get Staff Back in the Office Leading to Consolidation of Locations
Amazon has been moving to require more staff to return to the office for some time but recent indications suggest that the company is now taking the next step of consolidating smaller locations into larger ones – which could require employees to relocate in order to hold on to their jobs.
A U.S. Trend Unlikely to Show Up in Toronto
With fare revenues still well short of pre-pandemic levels, the possibility that the TTC would entertain free fares in key areas like downtown is nil to none. But such a proposal would surely get people’s attention.
“The Occupancy Index is supported by the City of Toronto, Downtown Yonge BIA, and Downtown West BIA. It is a measure of the percentage of office employees returning to the office compared to the number of employees who would normally have come to their offices pre-COVID. For a detailed description of the calculation please contact Iain Dobson at [email protected],”