Comcast is walking back in-person requirements for some Philly employees

Less than a year after asking all headquarters employees to report back to the office at least three days a week, Comcast is changing course for a group of Philadelphia recruiters.

Roughly 20 professional recruiters will now be classified as virtual home-office employees, beginning Sunday, said Bill Strahan, Comcast’s executive vice president of human resources.

These employees will still have access to the company’s Philadelphia headquarters and may choose to work there, but they will no longer have designated space in the office and are not required to come in.

The new designation is “really just aligning to the vast majority of recruiters in the field and how they’ve worked,” Strahan said.

Comcast’s professional recruiters across the country are often meeting with candidates via video or phone, and not in-person at offices, he said, but this group had been called back into headquarters simply by virtue of being located in Philadelphia. They’re generally not managers of other employees.

“We probably should have made them virtual home office-based from the beginning” of the return-to-office planning, Strahan added.

Comcast asked its U.S. employees to come back into the office three days a week — specifically Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — beginning in September.

For Philadelphia, where the company has about 8,000 employees in its two downtown towers, the shift was widely seen as a signal to the rest of the local business community that in-office work would be part of the future.

The change immediately fueled a boost in Center City foot traffic that seems to have persisted. A recent report from Center City District showed a 14% bump in downtown foot traffic from April 2022 to April 2023, and the largest population of nonresident workers in the office district around Comcast Center since March 2020.

Behind the scenes, ahead of the September return, Comcast had been evaluating each team and role individually to determine whether some roles should be fully remote.

“What we try to do is recognize that we’re a large, complex company,” Strahan said. “It allows us to appeal to more employees by saying that this particular role works just fine in a work-from-home environment.”

Before the pandemic, very few jobs at Comcast were designated to the virtual home office, Strahan said, but now a little over 25,000 positions are designated as virtual home-office roles. That includes 15,000 people in the company’s call centers and a variety of other jobs that “frequently work on a transactional basis or do focused, solitary work,” Strahan said.

A few thousand of those jobs were designated as home-office roles just last summer. Strahan also noted that outside of its headquarters and other office buildings, Comcast has people working in operations centers, retail stores, and on the road servicing customers.

“Taking an approach of knowing why each job fits into the category it does is an important thing leaders need to do,” Strahan said. “We’re constantly watching and learning.”