Companies knew to expect pandemic surprises heading into winter, and they keep coming to fruition, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Biden administration’s vaccine mandate is in limbo. The threat of the Omicron variant is still being studied. International travel is getting more restrictive again. The muddled picture is causing a broad reassessment across the corporate sphere. Some companies are rethinking vaccine policies and pushing off return-to-office plans, while others are working to maintain existing timelines to bring people together. The varied responses reflect the difficulties many companies face in sizing up the state of the pandemic now and its trajectory in the months ahead, more than a dozen executives said. Meanwhile, the longer that delays persist, the more some employees get set in their at-home routines and gain conviction they can do their jobs from anywhere, for the long term. In recent days, companies as varied as Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., Ford Motor Co. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have delayed return-to-office dates or given employees the option to stay home longer. Ride-hailing company Lyft Inc. told its corporate employees last week they wouldn’t be required back in its offices until 2023. Read more. (Subscription required.)
In related news, some of the largest U.S. hospital systems have dropped COVID-19 vaccine mandates for staff after a federal judge temporarily halted a Biden administration mandate that healthcare workers get the shots, the Wall Street Journal reported. Hospital operators including HCA Healthcare Inc. and Tenet Healthcare Corp. as well as nonprofits AdventHealth and the Cleveland Clinic are dropping the mandates. Labor costs in the industry have soared, and hospitals struggled to retain enough nurses, technicians and even janitors to handle higher hospitalizations in recent months as the Delta variant raged. Vaccine mandates have been a factor constraining the supply of healthcare workers, according to hospital executives, public-health authorities and nursing groups. Many hospitals already struggled to find workers, including nurses, before the pandemic. The shortages were compounded by burnout among many medical workers and the lure of high pay rates offered to nurses who travel to hot spots on short-term contracts. Read more. (Subscription required.)
