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Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk made headlines recently by insisting that all of his employees return to the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week. Those who refuse can look for other jobs. “They should pretend to work somewhere else,” Musk reportedly wrote in an email to staff.

Most other companies have adopted less stringent requirements. And for a variety of reasons, experts and corporate executives believe that life in the office will likely never go back to what it was before the pandemic, Musk’s attitude notwithstanding.

Business leaders are grappling with the implications of that change. And so, too, are developers, building managers and city officials. Jeremy Farrell, for one, has been giving that issue a lot of thought.

A former corporation counsel for Jersey City, Farrell is now senior managing director of community and government affairs at Lefrak. His purview includes Jersey City’s Newport development area. NJBIZ recently spoke with Farrell about how the various constituencies with interests in what the new workweek will look like — including Lefrak — are adapting to the changes.

“We’re seeing that there is a greater interest among employers to return … but there has been some amount of resistance on the employee side,” he said. “And that’s an important balance to figure out because there are the immediate concerns on the employee side but there’s another side to that, which is long term, for all the reasons why we have a large population of talent here. We need people in office, working together learning from each other. … It’s like a basketball player — they’ll tell you when you’re playing basketball or any sport, soccer, ‘you are a talent on your own, but if you’re playing with other really talented people you elevate your game.’ And so when we get people back in the office space they’re going to elevate each other’s game and so some of those synergies are missing.”

To watch the full interview, click on the image below.