Milwaukee employers think it will take some convincing for employees to leave their home offices

Employees who began working from home more than a year ago at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely need some encouragement before returning to the office, business leaders said during a Greater Milwaukee Committee panel discussion Monday. 

The executives in the discussion were from Graef, Marcus Corp. and Manpower.

They said they believe having employees working alongside each other in an office environment creates value for the company. The employers all took action last year to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 by switching to remote work. 

Now, as people become vaccinated, the companies are preparing to motivate employees to leave their homes and sweatpants to rejoin their colleagues in offices. 

Some of the decisions to return are dependent upon government guidance for social distancing and mask-wearing. All people in Wisconsin over the age of 16 are now eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, which was another barrier to return. 

"If COVID went away tomorrow, if every disease went away, you could say 'there is absolutely no risk of coming into the office,' it would still be a difficult task to get people to come back into the office because of the habits they've built up over the last year," said John Kissinger, president and CEO of Graef. 

Kissinger said he expects the company will start encouraging everyone to return to the office every day starting two to six months from now. The office environment only has value if a large number of employees are there, Kissinger said. 

President and CEO of Marcus Corp. Greg Marcus thinks that FOMO (fear of missing out) is going to draw people back to the office. Leadership will need to create that incentive for people to want to be in the office, he said. 

"They have to want to come here and we have to make the environment that makes them want to be together," Marcus said.

About 30% to 40% of the Marcus employees are coming into the office voluntarily, Marcus said. Marcus has not set a deadline for employees to return to the office. Eventually, the company will schedule a return-to-work deadline because it plans to continue having an "office first" culture. 

Manpower has been slowly returning employees to the Milwaukee headquarters, said Chairman and CEO Jonas Prising. 

He expects that a larger group of employees will be in the office starting after the July 4th holiday with a full return after Labor Day. Prising said child care continues to be a limiting factor for working parents. 

"We're trying to use the language of not going back to the office but rather moving forward in a new way," Prising said. "We are fully intending on finding new routines and new ways of working and new ways of thinking." 

Sarah Hauer can be reached at shauer@journalsentinel.com or on Instagram @HauerSarah and Twitter @SarahHauer. Subscribe to her weekly newsletter Be MKE at jsonline.com/bemke.