It’s been a bumpy ride for the office jobs that support office jobs

By the end of this week, we should know more about the state of the labor market in this country. That’s because on Friday we’ll get the newest monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s all in the report with this kind of funny name — “The Employment Situation Summary” — which tells us about the number of people working as well as their wages, the number of hours they worked, that kind of thing.

And it tracks employment in all manner of sectors. Right now we’re going to focus on office work, and the web of jobs that support office work — the folks who recruit people. The security guards. The people who enter data. The people who water the office plants.

Well, those jobs have seen some big changes, and it’s a sign of bigger things going on in the labor market and the office.

You know all those office plants in the office? Well, somebody is taking care of them. And in the past it might have been Chelsii Gregory, CEO of The Plant Doctors.

Five years ago her Portland-based company was installing monsteras at offices, taking care of pothos at offices, refreshing fiddle leaf figs at offices. And then the pandemic hit and there were almost no offices for a while.

“We saw a huge uptick in residential clients,” said Gregory.

So, The Plant Doctors still happily does its plant thing at people’s home offices and homes. As office offices started to come back, the office business did too — kind of.

“Places would rehire us but all of their plants had died,” Gregory said. “But a lot of places have employees just not wanting to come back into the office, and so some of those accounts we have just moved on from.”

Jobs in this kind of work — the work that makes offices and buildings run, makes them nice — grew about 2.6% last year. It’s growth but it’s not huge growth. And exactly as Gregory experienced, it reflects a rough ride back to the office.

“The office market in commercial real estate is still suffering,” said Thomas LaSalvia with Moody’s Commercial Real Estate. “In the fourth quarter we saw the vacancy rate break its record, so in our data we are sitting at 19.6%.”

The reality is we still do not know where the remote, hybrid, office work balance is going to settle, and so the number of people who will be working in the office ecosystem is also up in the air.

“They’ll keep going up for a while cause you’re still pulling people back to the office. It’s just you won’t need anywhere near the number of people you had in 2019,” said Michael Montgomery with S&P Global Market Intelligence.

But the slow and messy return to the office has actually created a bonanza for other office jobs. Human Resources consultants, for example, have increased 18% since the pandemic and are still very high, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

“Managing office workers and how they do their work and how they’re compensated and how they are incentivized, that has become more challenging now that they are no longer in the physical office,” said Pollak.

The web of office jobs behind the office jobs is still being rebuilt.