How to REOPEN an economy
From making offices safe to accommodating staff who want to work from home, getting back to business is about more than just loosening restrictions across the country
Saskatchewan was the first to pull the trigger on lifting the pandemic-induced shutdown, a move a week ago that brought equal degrees of hope and anxiety to individuals and businesses both within the province and around the country.
Its reopening is gradual, starting with medical services such as dentists being allowed to see patients, then golf courses will open, followed by provincial parks in June. Quebec followed suit, in much bolder fashion despite having the highest death toll in the country and a stubbornly high rate of new COVID-19 cases.
Quebec Premier François Legault spent much of Thursday defending his decision to reopen the province’s economy in phases starting Monday, fielding tough questions about the risks of reopening day cares, elementary schools, factories and retail stores amidst a curve that had barely flattened.
“Nothing is perfect, nothing in life is 100 per cent, but we calculate, with the help of public health, that it’s better for children to return to school,” he said.
By contrast, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose province is gradually seeing a decrease in the rate of infections, immediately dismissed the idea of reopening schools in a press conference on Wednesday.
“I’m just not going to do it,” he said. “We’ve got to protect our children at all costs and we’ll make that decision by the end of the month.”
The clamouring to reopen continues nevertheless, with protesters ignoring social distancing protocols, even though many experts believe that until a COVID-19 vaccine is found and widely distributed — a process that might take 18 months or more — normalcy will not resume even if governments throw their economies wide open.
Until then, there will be a tug of war between the public’s health and the long- term damage to the economy of staying partly closed, with tricky questions surrounding when to open, how to open up and who is allowed outside and in what circumstances, without increasing the risk of overrunning public health facilities with a surge of COVID-19 cases.
But it doesn’t get any easier for business owners once those decisions have been made since they are the ones who will have to figure out how to bring their employees back without jeopardizing their health and safety. That process will include redesigning workplaces, interacting with customers in different ways, increasing sanitation efforts and perhaps even paying people in different ways, all of which come with myriad headaches and extra costs at a time when many businesses are already on life-support benefits.
For example, retailers and restaurants, for the sake of their own survival, will have to somehow entice people to come out to shop and eat, despite the ever-present risk of contracting the virus. There are or will be provincial and maybe municipal guidelines to follow, but no amount of cleaning or spacing people out will convince everyone that it’s safe.
“To the degree that we have to weigh up moral, economic and health concerns … that is something we all have to collectively do. There are no single set of experts here,” said Steven Pearlstein, Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
“Governments will put out guidelines on reopening, saying here’s what you can do, here’s what you can’t do.
That does not necessarily mean every company or consumer or business will follow. We all get to decide as consumers and workers and company executives how much and when and how we are going to do things. And we’ll only know if we struck the right balance in hindsight.”
Even in j urisdictions where government guidelines on reopening remain vague, major companies have started brainstorming new ways of working that incorporate physical distancing into their floor plans.
Darryl Wright, a human resources consultant at Ernst & Young LLP, said he has started seeing a number of companies bring in experts to redesign offices and configure them according to the requirements of landlords that are mandating physical distancing in indoor spaces.
“Some of the things that are being considered are one- way passages in office spaces so people don’t brush past each other, the number of people that should be allowed in a boardroom or how many people should even be in an office space at a given time,” Wright said. “We are basically trying to agree on what a base model of working might look like when we are allowed to reopen.”
A recent survey conducted by international architectural and design company Ware Malcomb found that employees will be “emboldened to push back on returning to work” until they feel it is safe to do so.
It suggests companies take the temperature of individual employees or use fever scanning systems and introduce staggered work times and four- day work weeks, tactics that have already been adopted at some large banks in Hong Kong, a city- state that from the getgo employed effective methods of contract tracing and isolation to curb community spread of the virus.
For example, employees at the Hong Kong headquarters of French banking giant BNP Paribas cannot enter the building without a mask. Everybody’s temperature is checked when walking into an office building or restaurant on the island.
Cynthia Milota, Ware Malcomb’s director of workplace strategy, also suggests that office lunch and break times be scheduled or lengthened to “minimize occupant loads,” similar to how large high schools stagger their lunch periods.
The company has also produced modified workplace floor plans that vastly reduce the number of people in a given space or on a specific floor.
“Remove chairs or even monitors to discourage unoccupied workstation use,” Milota said. “Seating should remain assigned until the widespread threat of virus transmission has diminished.”
Some companies may figure that they need less space if their employees are going to stay at home for the long term, but Lowest Rates Inc., which runs a website that helps people find the low insurance and mortgage rates and employs about 50 people, is accelerating a planned move into a larger physical office space.
“We’re going to have to move offices, because we’re taking this very seriously,” chief executive Justin Thouin said. “We never want to put the team in a position where they feel unsafe and uncomfortable, so we will be actively looking to move into a larger office where desks are wider apart and ventilation is better.”
He said his company has had a remarkably positive experience throughout the pandemic, which has enabled the company to afford a larger office space. Business is improving and he is looking to hire even more staff.
“We are actually using this opportunity to pick up talent that has been let go by other organizations,” Thouin said.
Even if governments and companies allow workers to return to their desks, working remotely might become the new normal, said Kareen Emery, director of innovation and consulting at The Foundry by Monster, an employer branding agency.
“I can’t name specific clients, but there are companies that are now saying as long as employees are productive, and work at the same efficiency level, they are going to keep them at home,” she said. “The thing is, even if you practice physical distancing at work, employees have to take public transit to commute in, and that’s going to be a problem. It’s a benefit to employees and to companies to continue keeping them at home.”
One such example is Opentext, the Canadian software developer giant. In a recent earnings call, company CEO Mark Barrenechea said that half of Opentext’s office will not open up even when allowed, implying that a greater number of employees will now work from home permanently. “More than 95 per cent of Opentext employees have moved to remote work and have maintained productivity throughout,” he said.
Indeed, EY’S Wright believes that companies in the post-virus, pre-vaccine world will oscillate between letting white- collar workers continue working remotely and encouraging them to come in to reconstituted, openplan workspaces with builtin physical distancing.
“Remote working isn’t for everyone,” he said. “I know that some people want to come back to the office, but they need to be given the reassurance that it is safe to come back.”
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s back-to-work strategy will include alternate work- from- home days, though final plans for the two- thirds of its employees currently working remotely have yet to be fully confirmed.
“Our pace will be measured as appropriate,” a CIBC spokesperson said.
At KPMG Canada, allowing employees to return to their regular workplaces will to some extent hinge on the health- care system ramping up testing and i nstituting proper contact tracing, methods that Canada has largely lagged on, especially compared to some East Asian countries such as Singapore and South Korea.