Best Buy to Test Return-to-Office Plans Over the Holidays
Most of Minnesota’s biggest corporate players have pushed their return-to-office plans into 2022, but a small group of employees at Best Buy Co. Inc. will return to the company’s Richfield headquarters over the holidays.
Starting the first week of November, Best Buy will ask a “small number of teams” to spend some time working on the Richfield campus, a spokesperson confirmed via email. The holiday plan will ultimately serve as a road test for the company’s long-term plans for a hybrid work model. That means the employees likely won’t be working five days a week in the physical office.
The holiday return only applies to employees who “work closely” on the retailer’s holiday-related plans. The spokesperson declined to share exactly how many employees will return ahead of the holidays. The Richfield HQ, built in the early aughts, has space for up to 7,500 employees.
All workers returning to the office for the holiday season are required to be vaccinated against Covid-19. The company says that nearly 90 percent of its corporate workers are vaccinated.
Best Buy expects the remainder of its corporate employees to return to the office in early 2022.
The delta variant of the novel coronavirus threw a wrench in many companies’ return-to-office plans. Target Corp., which originally planned to bring corporate workers back to the office this month, doesn’t expect workers to return to the office until sometime in 2022. Wells Fargo, the Dorsey & Whitney law firm, and Amazon are among the other employers that have temporarily shelved plans for office returns in the Twin Cities, the Star Tribune reported last month.
