July Is the New January: More Companies Delay Return to the Office

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From Ford to Microsoft, white-collar companies are increasingly working and working at home next summer.

When the coronavirus closed offices around the United States in March, many companies told their employees that it would be a short distance away from headquarters.

The workers, they said, would return to their feet within weeks. Churches turn September. Then September turned into January. And now, as the virus continues to grow in some parts of the country, a growing number of employers are delaying their return to office again, in the early summer of 2021.

Google was one of the first to announce July 2021 as its return date. Uber, Slack and Airbnb soon jumped on the bandwagon. Last week, Microsoft, Target, Ford Motor and The New York Times also said they had postponed the return of personal services next summer and acknowledged the inevitable: The epidemic would not go away anytime soon.

"Let's just bite the bullet," said Joan Burke, a senior official of the DocuSign people in San Francisco. In August, his company, which owns electronic signatures, decided to allow its 5,200 employees to work from home until June 2021.