Return-to-office mandates rise as worker productivity drops

When Bill Mandara was a young architect decades ago, he would follow senior designers around his office to pick their brains to learn the profession.

“In architecture, and I’d imagine in a lot of other industries, what’s particularly important is the mentorship,” said Mandara, now CEO of Mancini Duffy, a Manhattan-based architecture and interior design firm with about 90 employees.

Mentorship, collaboration, and productivity, Mandara argues, suffer in remote-work settings. So he began asking his employees to return to the office as soon as Manhattan would allow it during the COVID-19 pandemic — in June 2020.

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