Business

Back-to-office orders have become common. Enforcement not so much

Published

1 year ago

October 21, 2024

Back-to-office orders have become common. Enforcement not so much

Since Cynthia Clemons’ employer announced last month that she was required to be in the office two days each week, the switch from remote work hasn’t been smooth.

The self-described extrovert, who works as an organizer for the nonprofit Abundant Housing LA, said she so far hasn’t “gotten into a rhythm of being productive at a desk again.”

“I feel like I’m back in grade school and being forced to sit down and do my homework,” she said. “Maybe it’s a matter of getting used to it.”

More than four years after the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled work culture by closing offices and forcing people to work from home, friction between bosses and their employees over the terms of their return shows no signs of abating.

About 80% of organizations have put in place return-to-office policies, but in a sign that many managers are reluctant to clamp down on the flexibility employees have become accustomed to, only 17% of those organizations actively enforce their policies, according to recent research by real estate brokerage CBRE.

“Some organizations out there have ‘mandated’ something, but if most of your organization is not following that mandate, then there is not too much you can do to enforce it,” said Julie Whelan, head of research into workplace trends for CBRE.

So, for many employers, setting rules for how often workers must come to the office has turned into a tricky search for a Goldilocks formula that will keep both bosses and workers reasonably happy — or at least not in open conflict. Managers may yearn for the days when daily attendance was a given, but their employees have moved on to a new normal and appear to be in no mood to go back.

The tension “is due to the fact that we have changed since we all went to our separate corners and then came back” from pandemic-imposed office exile, said Elizabeth Brink, a workplace expert at architecture firm Gensler. “It’s fair to say that we have different needs now.”

A disconnect persists between employer expectations for office attendance and employee behavior, CBRE found. Sixty percent of leaders surveyed said they want their employees in the office three or more days a week, while only 51% reported that employees work in the office at that frequency.

Conversely, 37% of employees show up one or two days a week, yet only 17% of employers are satisfied with that attendance.

CBRE surveyed 225 corporate real estate executives who oversee portfolios of office buildings to analyze trends among occupants seeking to implement hybrid work models.

As employers struggle to get their employees back in person, they also are also calculating whether to shed office space to cut down on rent, typically the largest cost of operating a business after payroll. Some employers are eliminating personal desks in favor of unassigned work stations that can be occupied as needed, allowing businesses to shrink their office footprints.

Such downsizing has contributed to widespread office vacancies in some urban centers including downtown Los Angeles, where overall vacancy is more than 30%, according to CBRE.

In efforts to raise attendance, companies are experimenting with carrots and sticks, trying to make the office a more appealing place to visit while testing methods to enforce in-office policies.

At Los Angeles financial services firm Wedbush Securities, most employees are expected to be in the office one-third of the days of the month while working remotely the rest of the time. The reduction in required time on-site has allowed the firm to cut its office footprint dramatically from more than 100,000 square feet in downtown L.A. to 20,000 square feet in an ongoing move to new quarters in Pasadena.

President Gary Wedbush is depending on supervisors “to keep their teams honest” about how often they show up at work, he said, but some compliance measures may be coming.

“There definitely needs to be some type of enforcement function,” he said, though the firm hasn’t settled on one yet. Among the options are tracking security badge swipes or checking where company laptops are plugged in during the day.

Attendance will also be “an important factor” in performance evaluations, Wedbush said. “We need to have colleagues be together to collaborate, because we definitely think that’s going to support and continue to improve our client experience. We feel very strongly about that.”

Employees at the DTLA Alliance business improvement district in downtown Los Angeles do not have to follow a formal or enforced attendance policy, Executive Vice President Nick Griffin said, but “the expectation is you should default to working in the office unless there is a good reason otherwise.”

“I personally prefer being in the office, to be close to my team and to be able to chat through things at the drop of a hat,” he said. “That’s very valuable to me.”

Flexibility is helpful to employees, though, he said. Some of Griffin’s staff work from home now and then, and he highlighted an employee with a small child who lives far from the office who is allowed to work remotely most of the time while being “among the most productive members of our team.”

“One of the things that we have found is that good employees are good employees, whether they’re in the office or remote, and mediocre employers are mediocre, whether they’re chained to their desk or not.”

The DTLA Alliance’s accommodation of the employee with a young child and a long commute reflects the challenge bosses have in meeting the desires of employees in different stages of their lives and careers as companies move past one-size-fits-all attendance policies.

Younger people may value the freedom to get their work done around going to the gym or meeting with friends, while an older employee might be juggling commuting to the office with child care or elder care, Whelan said.

“First of all, regardless of generation, from baby boomers down to Gen Z, flexibility is important,” Whelan said. “Nobody wants to be told anymore that there’s one place they need to be from eight to six, five days a week.”

An employee works in a common space at the Los Angeles offices of ChowNow, an online food-ordering platform.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Bosses, meanwhile, see value in having people of all experience levels in the office to build a corporate culture and shared sense of mission.

“The crux of this challenge is keeping people at younger stages engaged and feeling like they’re part of something bigger, and that they’re getting that knowledge-sharing and mentorship they need to really further their career,” Whelan said. “The younger generation needs the older generation to be there to pass down that knowledge.”

Being in the office can boost employees’ mental health, Brink said, especially if it has a variety of work spaces that allow staff to both collaborate and work privately.

“One of the reasons people do want to come in to the office is to connect with one another,” she said, “because it’s been really challenging for many people to be so isolated.”

Free food and drinks, comfortable furniture, and communal work tables can be draws, Brink said. Some newer offices have library-type spaces designated as quiet zones, where cellphones and conversations are not allowed.

“That can be really helpful for people who need that intense focus,” she said.

Offices will remain “a very core piece of organizational culture” in the years ahead, Whelan said, but how often employees will be required to be there is far from settled.

“I do believe that it will take a generational change in management before this story is really fully told,” she said. Future generations of leadership may decide to vary in-office requirements depending on the goals of their organizations at particular points in time.

“It will become less of a conversation of how many days of the week and more of a conversation about, are the things that I’m supposed to be accomplishing with my team together being accomplished?”

Business

Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI after clash with Pentagon

Published

6 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI after clash with Pentagon

President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.

In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”

“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.

The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.

Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.

The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.

“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.

Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”

The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.

On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.

The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.

Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.

“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.

Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.

“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.

Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.

“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”

Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.

The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”

Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.

The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.

Business

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

Published

17 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

new video loaded: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

In mapping out Elon Musk’s wealth, our investigation found that Mr. Musk is behind more than 90 companies in Texas. Kirsten Grind, a New York Times Investigations reporter, explains what her team found.

By Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey

February 27, 2026

Business

Commentary: How Trump helped foreign markets outperform U.S. stocks during his first year in office

Published

18 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Commentary: How Trump helped foreign markets outperform U.S. stocks during his first year in office

Trump has crowed about the gains in the U.S. stock market during his term, but in 2025 investors saw more opportunity in the rest of the world.

If you’re a stock market investor you might be feeling pretty good about how your portfolio of U.S. equities fared in the first year of President Trump’s term.

All the major market indices seemed to be firing on all cylinders, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index gaining 17.9% through the full year.

But if you’re the type of investor who looks for things to regret, pay no attention to the rest of the world’s stock markets. That’s because overseas markets did better than the U.S. market in 2025 — a lot better. The MSCI World ex-USA index — that is, all the stock markets except the U.S. — gained more than 32% last year, nearly double the percentage gains of U.S. markets.

That’s a major departure from recent trends. Since 2013, the MSCI US index had bested the non-U.S. index every year except 2017 and 2022, sometimes by a wide margin — in 2024, for instance, the U.S. index gained 24.6%, while non-U.S. markets gained only 4.7%.

The Trump trade is dead. Long live the anti-Trump trade.

— Katie Martin, Financial Times

Broken down into individual country markets (also by MSCI indices), in 2025 the U.S. ranked 21st out of 23 developed markets, with only New Zealand and Denmark doing worse. Leading the pack were Austria and Spain, with 86% gains, but superior records were turned in by Finland, Ireland and Hong Kong, with gains of 50% or more; and the Netherlands, Norway, Britain and Japan, with gains of 40% or more.

Investment analysts cite several factors to explain this trend. Judging by traditional metrics such as price/earnings multiples, the U.S. markets have been much more expensive than those in the rest of the world. Indeed, they’re historically expensive. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index traded in 2025 at about 23 times expected corporate earnings; the historical average is 18 times earnings.

Investment managers also have become nervous about the concentration of market gains within the U.S. technology sector, especially in companies associated with artificial intelligence R&D. Fears that AI is an investment bubble that could take down the S&P’s highest fliers have investors looking elsewhere for returns.

But one factor recurs in almost all the market analyses tracking relative performance by U.S. and non-U.S. markets: Donald Trump.

Investors started 2025 with optimism about Trump’s influence on trading opportunities, given his apparent commitment to deregulation and his braggadocio about America’s dominant position in the world and his determination to preserve, even increase it.

That hasn’t been the case for months.

”The Trump trade is dead. Long live the anti-Trump trade,” Katie Martin of the Financial Times wrote this week. “Wherever you look in financial markets, you see signs that global investors are going out of their way to avoid Donald Trump’s America.”

Two Trump policy initiatives are commonly cited by wary investment experts. One, of course, is Trump’s on-and-off tariffs, which have left investors with little ability to assess international trade flows. The Supreme Court’s invalidation of most Trump tariffs and the bellicosity of his response, which included the immediate imposition of new 10% tariffs across the board and the threat to increase them to 15%, have done nothing to settle investors’ nerves.

Then there’s Trump’s driving down the value of the dollar through his agitation for lower interest rates, among other policies. For overseas investors, a weaker dollar makes U.S. assets more expensive relative to the outside world.

It would be one thing if trade flows and the dollar’s value reflected economic conditions that investors could themselves parse in creating a picture of investment opportunities. That’s not the case just now. “The current uncertainty is entirely man-made (largely by one orange-hued man in particular) but could well continue at least until the US mid-term elections in November,” Sam Burns of Mill Street Research wrote on Dec. 29.

Trump hasn’t been shy about trumpeting U.S. stock market gains as emblems of his policy wisdom. “The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election,” he said in his State of the Union address Tuesday. “Think of that, one year, boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts for the millions and the millions of Americans.”

Trump asserted: “Since I took office, the typical 401(k) balance is up by at least $30,000. That’s a lot of money. … Because the stock market has done so well, setting all those records, your 401(k)s are way up.”

Trump’s figure doesn’t conform to findings by retirement professionals such as the 401(k) overseers at Bank of America. They reported that the average account balance grew by only about $13,000 in 2025. I asked the White House for the source of Trump’s claim, but haven’t heard back.

Interpreting stock market returns as snapshots of the economy is a mug’s game. Despite that, at her recent appearance before a House committee, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi tried to deflect questions about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein records by crowing about it.

“The Dow is over 50,000 right now, she declared. “Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

I predicted that the administration would use the Dow industrial average’s break above 50,000 to assert that “the overall economy is firing on all cylinders, thanks to his policies.” The Dow reached that mark on Feb. 6. But Feb. 11, the day of Bondi’s testimony, was the last day the index closed above 50,000. On Thursday, it closed at 49,499.50, or about 1.4% below its Feb. 10 peak close of 50,188.14.

To use a metric suggested by economist Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan, if you invested $48,488 in the Dow on the day Trump took office last year, when the Dow closed at 48,448 points, you would have had $50,000 on Feb. 6. That’s a gain of about 3.2%. But if you had invested the same amount in the global stock market not including the U.S. (based on the MSCI World ex-USA index), on that same day you would have had nearly $60,000. That’s a gain of nearly 24%.

Broader market indices tell essentially the same story. From Jan. 17, 2025, the last day before Trump’s inauguration, through Thursday’s close, the MSCI US stock index gained a cumulative 16.3%. But the world index minus the U.S. gained nearly 42%.

The gulf between U.S. and non-U.S. performance has continued into the current year. The S&P 500 has gained about 0.74% this year through Wednesday, while the MSCI World ex-USA index has gained about 8.9%. That’s “the best start for a calendar year for global stocks relative to the S&P 500 going back to at least 1996,” Morningstar reports.

It wouldn’t be unusual for the discrepancy between the U.S. and global markets to shrink or even reverse itself over the course of this year.

That’s what happened in 2017, when overseas markets as tracked by MSCI beat the U.S. by more than three percentage points, and 2022, when global markets lost money but U.S. markets underperformed the rest of the world by more than five percentage points.

Economic conditions change, and often the stock markets march to their own drummers. The one thing less likely to change is that Trump is set to remain president until Jan. 20, 2029. Make your investment bets accordingly.