In the new Miami, the old office culture reigns

Miami has long had a reputation as a balmy party destination, a place where spring breakers, Lamborghini-driving showoffs, Cuban culture, and clubs coalesce.

But the South Florida city has undergone a major transformation over the past 15 years. It became an international hub for art with Art Basel. Its high-end food scene blossomed, becoming one of the best in the nation. And, somehow, it quietly became “Wall Street South.”

J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs both now have major footprints in the city, and several hedge funds have sprung up there as well. A slew of Silicon Valley companies set up shop in Miami after the pandemic, too, in search of lower taxes and fewer Covid restrictions. 

Maybe it’s not so surprising, then, that Miami, newly flush with major corporations, has seen a bigger office comeback post-Covid than almost any other American city, according to data from Placer.ai, a startup that measures foot traffic to offices. 

Yesterday, Today Explained kicked off a miniseries on work after the pandemic by looking at how American workers were leaving the country in search of work-life balance and finding it in Portugal, where the country’s unique digital nomad visa programs have led to a flourishing expat remote-worker community.  

For today’s installment, the Today, Explained podcast team returned stateside, venturing to Miami to find out more about why companies there are calling knowledge workers into the office once again, and what it can show us about the delicate dance that employers all over the nation face as they try to rebuild their corporate cultures.

Going back to office for the “culture” 

Four years after the pandemic, only about 35 percent of Americans with jobs that can be worked remotely still work entirely from home, according to a 2023 report from Pew. They tend to be knowledge workers – people whose jobs demand that they’re sitting at a computer the bulk of the time.  

So why are Miami’s knowledge workers going into offices instead of staying home?  

The very same industries that are pouring into the South Florida city — financial services and tech — are the ones telling workers that it’s time to invest in “culture.”

“I think people are actually opting in to work in this culture,” Alex DiLeonardo, chief people officer for Citadel Securities, told us when we visited the financial firm’s sleek headquarters in the Brickell neighborhood of Miami in September. 

DiLeonardo used a lot of HR speak, but what he described to us was a vibes-y idea among employers that collaboration and values are forged from human interaction. The best way they think they can foster that creative “culture”? To make workers come into the office. At Citadel, that means in-office, five days a week. 

The idea of a workplace “culture” almost always shows up when a CEO calls people back to the office. Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy informed employees that they would be required to return to the office five days a week. In a statement titled “Strengthening our culture and teams,” Jassy made this case for in-office work: “[C]ollaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.”

That’s what Hasan Altaf was looking for when he recently graduated from college. “I think in the office, it’s just creativity, collaboration, everything,” he told us. 

Altaf, 22, is now a software engineer at Citadel in Miami. During the pandemic, he spent eight months working an internship fully remote and said the whole thing felt kind of empty. “I felt disconnected with my team. [T]hey were just, like, faces on a screen. I never met them in person.” Now, he’s got an easy commute by metro, there are killer views of the ocean and city from the building, and he gets to absorb lessons from his colleagues in real time. “The juices are flowing here.” 

To be clear, not everyone is fully opting into office life: One expert we talked with told us only about 20 percent of the 100,000 workers he’s surveyed want to be in an office five days a week. Another 30 percent wanted to work from home 100 percent of the time. 

While people are back in the office at greater rates in Miami, in general, workers across the country want more flexibility.

Companies vs. the worker

Many workers have gotten a taste of a different kind of life over the past four years, and for the vast majority, working from home has afforded an unprecedented sense of work-life balance, according to Pew. 

Many of them resent giving up the flexibility of hybrid or fully at-home work in favor of ideating in an open-concept office in hard pants. A recent survey of remote workers found that nearly 60 percent said they would quit if asked to return to the office.   

And there’s evidence that flexible models might be good not just for workers but for companies,  too. 

According to a recent USA Today Blueprint survey, 58 percent of white-collar workers prefer a hybrid model (working from home at least three days a week). A McKinsey survey this summer found that 87 percent of workers would say yes to flexible work if it’s offered. 

This means a company that adopts a fully in-office policy team could see the plan backfire, according to Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University who studies workplace trends. 

“[O]ne way this plays out is they have a ton of quits. They find it harder to hire,” Bloom said. “I know from talking to my own undergrads and MBAs, they don’t want to go in five days a week. So it’s going to be harder to hire them,” he said. 

A lot of firms get hung up on the idea of productivity, Bloom said. Companies, he argues, should measure their office policies against profitability. Not paying for an office is a huge cost saver. “It also turns out, if you’re hiring folks remotely, you can hire a lot better employee for your money because you’re not looking locally, you’re looking nationally or even globally.” The talent pool is the entire world.

Bloom recently published a study looking closely at this question of productivity. Working with a giant Chinese travel company, Bloom and his team compared two cohorts: The first worked in the office five days a week and the second was offered a hybrid schedule. They found that the hybrid workers were happier with their jobs and that fewer quit. They also found that performance reviews were not affected. People got their work done and they were happier. 

“Give me a good reason to come in every day”

Chatting up workers in Miami, we heard some complaints: “Give me a good reason to come in every day.” “I don’t need my boss babysitting my work.” “Commuting sucks.” 

A lot of people, though, were willing to meet the CEO culture warriors halfway and acknowledged that some time in the office was great for getting to know the people they worked with. They were also able to build trust with colleagues and learn by watching others do their jobs. For companies in the tech and financial spaces that are so vital to Miami’s rebirth, having workers meet them in the middle helps them navigate a number of issues beyond “culture,” too, including data privacy.  

Workers will be the ultimate judge of whether Citadel and other companies with the strictest office policies are right for them. If they disagree, they might just choose to develop their careers elsewhere.

For DiLeonardo, these complicated choices are just part of the new world order of work — and maybe even a sign of how far work culture has come.

“As somebody who spent my entire career in the people space, I think it’s great that all of these different forms of working are causing organizations and societies to ask questions about how best to enable individuals to succeed in their different roles and their different careers,” he said.  “But I also think that leaves a ton of room for organizations to choose the kind of environment that they provide and be very clear in the social contract about what it means to work at this  company.”