“Sneeze guard” partitions. “Safe zones” demarcating spots to stand in elevators. Contact tracing apps to detect interactions between co-workers and infrared temperature readings.
As Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and other states took steps to reopen their economies this week, and Boeing workers came back to their jobs after a three-week furlough, businesses, design firms, real estate developers and corporate advisers are starting to envision how a return to the office will work.
The transition is likely to be slow, uneven and cautious as employers navigate workers’ continued fears, government and public health restrictions, school and child-care closures, and — most of all — the prospects of a second, and possibly even more deadly, wave of the coronavirus.
Much depends on the availability — and accuracy — of virus and antibody testing kits. Antibody, or serological, tests might show who has developed an immune response to the disease and can safely return to work, but there are concerns about the tests’ accuracy.
Even so, companies are actively starting to prepare for the eventual return of at least some office workers who have been working remotely — rethinking floor layouts, staggering work schedules and making changes that could fundamentally shift relationships with employers, such as scanning temperatures. Other firms have borrowed from their experiences in Asia or from managing essential workers during the shutdown, relying more on adapting social distancing to the workplace.
At their most transformative, some tools could help businesses quickly identify the co-workers whom an infected employee has encountered at the office. PricewaterhouseCoopers has had conversations with more than 50 clients about a new contact tracing tool for businesses it plans to launch in early May.
The tool adds a new app or line of code to business apps that workers already have on their phones, then runs in the background, using Bluetooth or WiFi signals to catalogue other co-workers’ phones that come near.
When a worker reports a positive covid-19 test, authorized managers can quickly identify and notify any colleagues the employee has come into contact with to help avoid a wider outbreak, bypassing the lengthy process of interviewing workers and asking them to recall their interactions. The tracing works only on corporate properties, doesn’t collect location data and can only be accessed by certain managers, PwC said.
Companies are also talking about mandating thermal scanners, said Tom Puthiyamadam, who leads PwC’s U.S. Digital practice. “Not every enterprise is going to command and control mode, but I think right now some of these practices are warranted,” he said. “I don’t think many employees are going to say no, because a lot of [them] are actually scared to come back in.”
Some companies are exploring their own testing initiatives. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, wrote in an April 16 letter to investors that the e-commerce giant had moved a team of specialists from their day jobs to work on a testing initiative, assembling equipment to build its first lab and hoping to start testing “small numbers of our frontline employees soon.”
Goldman Sachs is considering adding infrared body temperature scanners to some offices, along with virus and antibody testing kits for employees once they become more available and front-line health care workers have their needed supplies.
Companies with offices in Asia that have begun reopening may be ahead of others with planning.
IBM, which has begun adding back workers in several locations in China and South Korea, has developed global standards for returning to the office. They include bringing back those who need access to on-site equipment or labs first, staggering arrival times so elevators don’t become too crowded, eliminating buffets and shared serving tools in cafeterias, and taking out furniture in other spaces to ease social distancing concerns in conference rooms.
“The more constraints you have in your office layouts, the less people will be able to adjust,” said Joanna Daly, a human resources vice president at IBM.