Gavin Newsom Orders State Employees to Return to Office

California state workers are being ordered to return to the office, according to a memo sent from the office of Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Ann Patterson, Newsom’s cabinet secretary issued a memo to top officials in California directing state employees to start working from the office again starting on June 17, according to Politico. State employees will be required to work in the office twice a week.

The announcement comes after various state agencies migrated to a work-from-home policy at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Due to more than 100 state agencies and departments setting their own work-related policies for the roughly 240,000 employees, there was a lot of “confusion” regarding the “expectations” of workers, Patterson wrote in the memo.

“The varied approaches have created confusion around expectations and are likely to exacerbate inconsistencies across agencies and departments,” Patterson explained.

Data from the Department of General Services in July 2023 showed that state employees throughout 22 departments spent 90 percent of their days working remotely, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Prior to the memo from Patterson, several state agencies have started instructing their workers to return to the office. Agencies such as the California Department of Public Health and the California Natural Resources Agency began instructing their employees to return to in-office work as early as the spring of this year.

In January 2023, a Monster Report found that large companies such as Disney, Twitter, and Starbucks, which had originally planned to adopt a hybrid or remote-work method, were instructing employees to return to the office. The report found that 33 percent of companies that had planned on adopting these work-from-home methods had changed their decision.

As remote work has gained popularity, even post-COVID, cities such as Washington, DC, San Francisco, California, and New York City, New York, have been experiencing a rise in office vacancies. In 2023, office vacancies across the nation reached 13.5 percent, an increase from the 9.5 percent seen in 2019.