The return-to-office reckoning isn't over just yet.
Anyone would be forgiven for believing the week after Thanksgiving would be a slow period in workplaces as most employees are attempting to wind things down during the even slower march to the new year. So it's surprising, upon first glance, to see that office occupancy rates hit 49% the week of Dec. 5, according to Kastle Systems. That was among the highest it's been since the pandemic sent the majority of Americans home in March 2020.
And experts say that number is expected to continue ticking upward—albeit slowly—as we enter 2023.
"It goes in fits and starts," says Kastle Systems Chairman Mark Ein. "[Office occupancy] has been on a steady rise since the beginning of [2022]. We've actually been talking about and predicting this rise for a while."
Kastle Systems has become something of a barometer for who's gaining ground in the employee-executive tug of war over returning to offices. The security company, which tracks patterns in employee office key-card entries, predicted at the onset of 2022 that office occupancy rates would see a slight but steady increase as the year progressed. And it has played out pretty much that way.
After dropping to a low of 15% in April 2020, office occupancy began steadily increasing in 2021 until the U.S. was hit by the Omicron wave. The first week of January 2022, rates hit 28%. Despite a lot of employee pushback and media coverage, things have been mostly on the upward trajectory since then.
The summer saw rates climb to the 43%–44% range, where they hovered until the fall, hitting a high of 47% in September.
Ein tells Fortune he believes those rates will consistently continue to rise. The 49% occupancy rate that seemed like an outlier for just after Thanksgiving was, more than anything, an example of where the return-to-office debate is going in the new year.
In fact, when you break it down by day, the first full week in December saw occupancy rates reach nearly 57% on Tuesday—the most popular day for going to the office—56% on Wednesday, and 51% on Thursday. Monday and Friday are understandably less popular, with a more than 23% difference in occupancy between the highest percentage day and the lowest.
One reason for the increase in office occupancy could be that many workers have projects to wrap up before the end of the year and preparation to do heading into 2023. That work, Ein argues, is more easily done in the office.
"It's actually a pretty intense and critical time," he says.