As COVID-19 infections surge in parts of the U.S., many workplaces remain empty or are operating with skeleton crews.
Most agree that the decision to return to the office should involve a combination of business, government and medical officials and scientists who have a deep understanding of COVID-19 and infectious disease in general. The exact timing will depend on many factors, including the government’s willingness to open up, the experts’ view of current conditions, business leadership’s tolerance for risk (or how reasonable it is to run the business remotely), where your business happens to be and the current conditions there.
That doesn’t mean every business that can open will, but if and when they get a green light, they can at least begin bringing some percentage of employees back. But what that could look like is clouded in great uncertainty around commutes, office population density and distancing, the use of elevators, how much you can reasonably deep clean, what it could mean to have a mask on for eight hours a day, and many other factors.
To get a sense of how tech companies are looking at this, we spoke to a number of executives to get their perspective. Most couldn’t see returning to the office beyond a small percentage of employees this year. But to get a more complete picture, we also spoke to a physician specializing in infectious diseases and a government official to get their perspectives on the matter.
Taking it slowly
While there are some guidelines out there to help companies, most of the executives we spoke to found that while they missed in-person interactions, they were happy to take things slow and were more worried about putting staff at risk than being in a hurry to return to normal operations.
Iman Abuzeid, CEO and co-founder at Incredible Health, a startup that helps hospitals find and hire nurses, said her company was half-remote even before COVID-19 hit, but since then, the team is now completely remote. Whenever San Francisco’s mayor gives the go-ahead, she says she will reopen the office, but the company’s 30 employees will have the option to keep working remotely.
She points out that for some employees, working at home has proven very challenging. “I do want to highlight two groups that are pretty important that need to be highlighted in this narrative. First, we have employees with very young kids, and the schools are closed so working at home forever or even for the rest of this year is not really an option, and then the second group is employees who are in smaller apartments, and they’ve got roommates and it’s not comfortable to work at home,” Abuzeid explained.
Those folks will need to go to the office whenever that’s allowed, she said. For Lindsay Grenawalt, chief people officer at Cockroach Labs, an 80-person database startup in NYC, said there has to be a highly compelling reason to bring people back to the office at this point.
“I think for employees, there are so many things that are unique with their situation in their personal life, but there better be a good business case to make it a requirement to come back to the office,” she said.
Pedro Bados, CEO at Nexthink, a 700-person company that helps customers manage employee’s digital experiences, has offices in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. He sees differing needs depending on office location and the requirements of individual employees and says it’s important to balance those different circumstances. “There are people really looking forward to coming back as soon as they can. When the public health authorities consider that it is possible to do it, we plan to open the office for them. That doesn’t mean it’s mandatory for everyone,” Bados said.
Work won’t be the same as before
Other executives have unique issues that require people to be in the office or just a real desire to return to face-to-face interactions as soon as it’s feasible to do so. For instance, Payam Banazadeh, CEO and co-founder at Capella Space, a company that makes satellites, has had to have his hardware engineers in the office since April. He says that they have found a way to cope, but it’s taken a lot of planning and it hasn’t been easy.
“What companies are probably thinking about now on how to open, we have had a version of that pretty much back in early April implemented for the hardware team. And it’s still going even to this day. We’re allowing only the hardware team to go to the office, and it’s very limited. We have people on a rotational schedule,” he said.
Further, he says they stay separated and continually wear masks, face shields and gloves, something he says is quite challenging to do for an entire day. They ask that employees don’t take public transportation, maintain physical distancing and stay home if they feel any symptoms.
Armen Vartarnian, SVP of global workforce services at Okta, a 2,500-person identity management company, says even when we do return to offices, it’s not going to be that same kind of collaborative environment that it was pre-COVID, and it’s going to require a lot of the same kinds of intense planning and restrictions that Banazadeh referred to with his company.
What’s more, when you have multiple offices, it’s going to depend very much on location. “And, by the way, not all the offices are the same. You have some offices that are in single-occupancy buildings, and you have some that are multitenant buildings, and you have some that are in the service offices and you’re relying on other parties to kind of create those safe environments. So, those all have different timelines too because you need to be able to control the safety of the spaces for your employees,” Vartarnian said.
Sam Gutmann, CEO at OwnBackup, a company that helps backup Salesforce data, has a different perspective. He hopes to get employees back to the office as soon as it’s safe to do so and has some ideas about how to make it a more enjoyable experience, even with the restrictions and rules that will have to be in place to keep everyone safe.
“I think there is a level of collaboration that’s just simply harder. We’re going to start inviting people back to our office, optionally through the end of the summer in a very socially distant way and hopefully schools go back to normal in the fall and we can bring more people back and kind of get back to some of the fun I think, culturally. I miss everyone,” Gutmann said.
He says they moved to a two-story building in New Jersey last year, so they have the space to spread out and don’t have to worry too much about elevators. They have added extra bathroom capacity to address that concern and will bring lunch in every day for employees. They are also considering adding a gym with an attendant to keep it clean and outdoor space with tables while the weather allows it.
The medical perspective
Dr. Shira I. Doron from Tufts Medical Center in Boston, whose specialties include infectious diseases and hospital epidemiology, says the safest thing to do if your job allows is to stay home and keep your number of contacts outside the people you live with to a minimum.
“People who can work from home and companies who can provide a work-from-home option should continue to do that until the pandemic is over — but that’s a long way away — or until there’s herd immunity or a vaccine that’s really bringing the levels down to where it’s safe to return everything to normal,” Doran said.
If that’s not an option, she said it will take a combined effort on the part of the government and employers to keep people as safe as possible. For the government’s part, that involves what she calls “The Three Ts” — testing, tracing and treatment. For the first element, that involves regular testing and keeping the number of infections on a favorable trend.
“The testing statistics need to be favorable, meaning you are testing a lot, but you also need to be seeing the percentage of people who are positive, among those tested going down and ideally less than 10%,” she said. That leads to the second component, which is tracing the people who have come in contact with anyone who has tested positive and have those people quarantine.
As for the treatment element, that means having enough available hospital beds, PPE for medical professionals and drugs to treat and mitigate the symptoms of the disease. “Those are the criteria basically for it being safe enough to go back to work and interact with people outside your household on a regular basis,” she said.
Staying safe at work
The other aspect of this is how you keep the workplace itself safe, which she says comes down to four key elements that medical professionals have been preaching about since the pandemic began: distancing, disinfecting, hygiene and masking. At work, Doron said that you have to be particularly careful in shared spaces like break rooms, corridors and elevators.
Siu-Li Khoe, vice president of business development at Rhode Island Commerce Corporation says her state has set up a website with best practices where companies can see the best ways to set up the office in a safe way and then self-certify.
“We have these visual descriptors, infographics, and they basically give guidance for how to get people back into the office,” she said. There are guidelines about capacity, distancing, cleaning — basically all of the points that Doron touched upon.
Image Credits: reopeningri.com
Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo also contacted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff early on in the crisis asking for help in building a contact tracing system in her state. According to reports, Benioff, who gave Raimondo credit for the design of the system, liked it so much, he used it as a basis for building Work.com, a website designed to give business leaders the tools and information they need to reopen offices safely.
Looking beyond COVID-19
One thing the pandemic has done is proven the viability of remote work at scale. It is possible to have everyone in a company, even one with tens of thousands of people, working remotely. Yet even with that proof point, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the end of the office as we know it.
Besides the people living in small spaces or those with small children, there are a host of employees who want to separate work and home, or who simply want that social aspect of being at work with other people and all that entails.
Banazadeh sees a need for camaraderie that he believes you can’t reproduce online over a video conference. “I don’t agree, I guess, that the office as we know it forever has been eliminated. And I worry that It’s really difficult to build a very connected culture without having some sort of physical interaction,” he said.
Aaron Levie, CEO at Box, speaking on Extra Crunch Live in May, said it’s likely we will have some sort of hybrid office-remote work situation, which is what he sees for his company moving toward.
What Box as an organization, and as a corporate entity, is landing on is trying to find the way to make that work and we have the best of both worlds. Can people maybe have a little bit more flexibility around when they work in the office and they have flexibility if they need to be remote for a sustained period?
How that will all work out is still to be determined, and probably can’t happen until we reach a time post-COVID. That unfortunately appears to be a ways away, and until we reach that point, going to the office is going to look very different.
For the immediate future at least, it will very likely involve a small percentage of the workforce working in a highly restricted way with masking and distancing, just as it is in other aspects of our lives.