Is Thursday the new Friday?
I finally retired shortly before the Covid pandemic hit us, so I have no current experience of the workplace. However, I live in central London so I see a lot of office workers and I talk to a lot of people in hospitality.
It seems to me that, since the ‘end’ of Covid, many people have adopted a blended work pattern with several days in the office and several days working at home. There appears to be a common pattern of working in the office on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and working from home Monday and Friday to make a long ‘weekend’.
This means that, from the point of view of the hospitality trade, Thursday has become the new Friday with Thursday evening being the peak time for visits to the pub and the restaurant.
What I see in central London appears to be confirmed by this article which states:
“Office workers in central London are spending on average 2.3 days a week in the workplace, according to a report that warns against a wholesale switch to working from home.The thinktank Centre for Cities carried out polling of office workers in the capital and found they were spending 59% of the time in their workplace compared with pre-Covid levels.
The study showed the most common working pattern was two days a week, accounting for 31% of respondents. Almost half of workers were in the office more often than that, however – three, four or five days a week.”