Last year, Salesforce trimmed 45% of its office footprint as a result of its commitment to hybrid work. “Our hybrid approach empowers leaders to make decisions for their teams about how and where they work,” a company spokesperson told The Standard.
In its report, Placer.ai added that the likes of New York and Miami have managed to regain up to 80% of their pre-pandemic office traffic, since they were not as reliant on the tech industry as San Francisco. Still, the return-to-office activity is still concentrated in the middle three days of the week, Placer.ai says, with traffic on Mondays and Fridays still down nearly 50% across the board since 2019.
Michael Cockburn, co-founder of Desana, a Scottish software company, has been traveling to San Francisco for months at a time since the start of last year. He does so because his company—which helps firms manage their hybrid workplaces in one platform—now gets up to 80% of its revenue from customers either headquartered in the city or in Silicon Valley.
“San Francisco is differentiated from any other city in the world,” Cockburn told The Standard over the phone, fresh off the plane back at home in Edinburgh. “The default attitude there is meaningfully more ambitious than anywhere else. As you spend more time there, you even start to adopt that behavior as well.”
For that reason, Cockburn said he’d like to return and formally open a Desana office in San Francisco in the near future. Until then, he’s looking to hire the company’s first non-remote role based solely in the city.
“A small, high-quality shopfront style where we can welcome people face-to-face sounds nice to me,” he said. “Definitely not rows and rows of desks.”
