The coronavirus pandemic is having corporations and office landlords scrambling like the average consumer. But instead of toilet paper, they are now scrambling with how to maintain a cohesive office environment while everyone works from home.

While not yet demanded on a national scale, San Francisco is the first city to have instituted a shelter-in-place policy, and many companies are requiring employees to work remotely while the coronavirus continues to spread in the U.S.

“Everybody is trying to figure out what their remote work policy should be. This is like a forced dry run for a lot of companies,” said Kay Sargent, the director of workplace for design firm HOK.

The spread of the coronavirus will force companies to fast-track the adoption of remote working practices, JLL wrote in a report this week. Many international companies that were distancing themselves from the practice in recent years likely will be flocking back to it.

“We are in the middle of the largest test of home-working in history, and corporates are adopting, refining and testing policies, processes and infrastructure to make it work,” JLL officials wrote in the report.

HOK already has been fielding calls from clients on how they can set up audiovisual and IT systems to handle holding conferences and meetings remotely, more often and with more participants, Sargent said.

“I was on a call the other day with a bunch of AV/IT integrators whose clients were saying, 'We need this stuff, and we need it now,'” she said.

“I think you're going to have companies who have never embraced mobile work-from-home or folks working in today's mobile economy, so they'll probably have some changes,” Colliers International Atlanta President Bob Mathews said.

But few office real estate executives see this have a long-term drain on office demand, especially since many companies are already operating on the lean side when it comes to corporate real estate, having spent the past decade bleeding out space efficiencies. As of last year, the average square feet of office per employee was 194, down 8.3% from a decade earlier.

Since 2005, the number of full-time employees who regularly work from home has grown by 173%, to 4.7 million people, according to consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics.

“I think that there will be a lot of questions regarding hoteling and other open-environment type setups,” CBRE Vice Chairman John Shlesinger said. "Do I see people switching because of this? Not really."

JLL researchers wrote that even an increase of work-from-home policies will have limited impact since most portfolios have been optimized. When the economy normalizes, new employment should outweigh any drain from home-working shifts, and companies ultimately still value having people together physically.