James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, has dismissed an edict requiring employees to be back in the office by now and issued a new forecast of how long companies would delay returning.
“I was wrong,” he told CNBC’s Wilfred Frost Monday on “Closing Bell”. “I thought we were out after Labor Day and we aren’t.”
In June, Gorman told conference attendees that he would be “very disappointed” if his workers had not returned to the Morgan Stanley buildings by Labor Day. These plans, which received widespread media coverage, were partially dashed by the discovery of the omicron variant of Covid. Companies from Lyft to Ford have had to postpone and reassess their plans to return to the office in the past few weeks.
“I think we’ll be in for most of the next year,” said Gorman. “Everyone still finds their way and then you get the Omikron variant; who knows, we will have pi, we will have theta and epsilon and at some point we will run out of letters of the alphabet. It’s still a problem. “
Still, more than half of Morgan Stanley’s employees are back in the company’s New York headquarters, where the bank’s commercial operations are located, Gorman said. About 65% of the vaccinated employees returned to this building and 95% of the employees received the vaccination, he said.
