I don’t know how to get the employees back

CEOs are at their wit’s end trying to figure out how to get their employees back to work as high levels of Covid infections persist 18 months after the start of the pandemic. That’s the sentiment shared by CNBC’s David Faber and Jim Cramer, who regularly speak to business leaders about the challenges of returning to work.

“I continue to hear a litany of frustration from those running large organizations in terms of the inability to bring people back to the office,” Faber said Friday in an exchange with his “Squawk on the” co-host. Street “Cramer. “I had lunch and dinner last night,” Faber said. “It’s just a never-ending theme. Some of these CEOs are at their wit’s end about how they deal with it. ‘How do I get people back.'”

Cramer said possible approval of a new Covid antiviral pill from Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics could be the “game changer we’ve been looking for” to make people who fear getting sick at work less afraid of going to the office. . Pfizer and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche have also joined the race to develop drugs against Covid.

“Most of the time when you’re talking with companies involved in the supply chain, the problem is absenteeism,” Cramer said. “People are scared. Maybe if that makes you less scared, you’ll report to work.”

Merck and Ridgeback said on Friday they plan to seek emergency clearance in the United States for their oral treatment for Covid after announcing “compelling results” in an advanced stage clinical trial in unvaccinated participants. The drug, molnupiravir, reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by approximately 50% for patients with mild or moderate Covid cases. If cleared by regulators, molnupiravir could be the first oral antiviral treatment for Covid.

Faber wondered if people who did not want to be vaccinated against Covid would take an antiviral pill. “It’s Merck. They know how to test,” Faber told Cramer, who nodded. “We wouldn’t be sitting here questioning it. But there will certainly be those who will, I’m sure.”

The delta variant has led to another recent spike in infections in the United States. While cases appeared to have peaked last month, the latest seven-day average of daily new infections was still 114,243. New Covid deaths have averaged 1,957 in the past seven days after peaking recent over 2,000, the worst since March.

American businesses have struggled, in spurts as cases fluctuate, with how to get their employees back to work safely and whether to impose vaccination warrants.

• On Friday, PwC announced it would allow all U.S. employees, nearly 40,000 of them, who can telecommute to work virtually from anywhere in the continental United States.
• Many big names in tech, including Apple, Amazon, Alphabet’s Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have postponed their return-to-work plans.
• Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said Tuesday, “We won’t all be returning” to the office. CEOs of big companies are calling him and saying they want their employees to return to the office, Benioff said in an onstage interview at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif. Benioff previously told CNBC that he expects 50 to 60 percent of Salesforce employees to work from home even after the pandemic.
• Wall Street financial firms have widely recalled their office workers, many of whom have hybrid schedules. Goldman Sachs is also requiring employees to be vaccinated in order to return to their offices, following similar edicts from Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.