Say hello again to the office, fingers crossed

Managers are hanging up welcome balloons and dusting off monitors with a sense of confidence.

Emma Goldberg

Feb 27, 2022 – 8.14pm

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Executives at investment firm TIAA are especially proud of one aspect of their back-to-work plans: The company is on only its second round of setting a return-to-office date. It first hoped to bring employees back in January but was derailed by the omicron variant. Now the firm is targeting March 7.

“We noticed other employers were saying, ‘We’ll be back in April.’ ‘We’ll be back in June.’ But we said we need some certainty,” says Sean Woodroffe, head of human resources at TIAA, which has 12,000 US employees. “This March 7 date is only the second time we announced a date.”