In L.A., a more laid-back return to office

With more tech and creative workers, city and state see smaller percentages of in-person attendance than U.S. as a whole

- Roger Vincent

OFFICE occupancy in downtown L.A. and other areas has not fully recovered after the pandemic shutdowns.

Even as bosses across the country report a jump in the number of people returning to the office, attendance in California remains less than half of what it used to be.

A recent survey shows that managers’ push to get workers back in the office is bearing fruit, but executives would still like to see people at their desks more often. A different dataset demonstrates that much of the lag is due to California.

Companies are stepping up enforcement of their attendance policies even as many workers try to avoid the daily routine of commuting and clocking in, real estate brokerage CBRE found in a national survey of office tenants.

Companies made “significant” progress in the last year in moving toward their office-attendance goals and enforcing their attendance policies, moving closer to cementing their long-term work guidelines than at any time since the COVID-19 pandemic, CBRE said.

The annual survey found that 72% of the companies surveyed have met their attendance goals, up from 61% the previous year.

“Companies have made significant progress on establishing a new baseline for work habits and office attendance after five years of adapting to hybrid work,” said Manish Kashyap, CBRE’s global president of leasing.

Still, a separate indicator released Tuesday shows how office visits are stuck below the national average in California.

The Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas still have some of the lowest office attendance in the country, according to the latest data from Kastle Systems, which provides key-card entry systems used by many companies and tracks patterns of workers’ card swipes.