Companies act to ward off virus

An oil company and a media group have told hundreds of employees in London to work from home. A television giant is stopping people who have visited certain countries from entering its offices in Europe. A German airline has asked workers to take unpaid leave.

For weeks, the coronavirus outbreak in China rattled global supply chains, exacting a toll on major businesses around the world, though often in indirect ways.

Now, as it spreads across Europe and Asia, the virus is becoming a more immediate threat to all types of businesses.

From Milan to Berlin to London, companies in practically every industry are refining their emergency protocols or sending employees home to try to prevent an outbreak.

This week, Chevron instructed 300 workers at one of its London offices to work from home after an employee returning from Italy developed flu-like symptoms.

The British pay-television company Sky has begun screening visitors at several of its European offices, telling employees that guests who have recently travelled in “higher risk” countries like China and Japan would be barred. Germany’s flagship airline, Lufthansa, has frozen hiring and offered employees unpaid leave as it braces for the economic effect of the virus to grow.

And on Tuesday, the advertising agency Dentsu instructed all the employees at its headquarters in Tokyo to work from home.

For the most part, these disruptions to daily work life have been confined to Europe and Asia. In China, most businesses ground to a halt in January as the government worked to contain the outbreak, which has sickened tens of thousands of people and killed over 3,000.

In Italy, the centre of the outbreak in Europe, a number of companies, including the insurance giant Generali and the fashion brand Armani, have adopted work-from-home policies to varying degrees.

Soon companies in the United States may have to begin sending workers home or taking other precautions.

On Tuesday, a top federal health official, Nancy Messonnier, called on cities and towns to plan “social distancing measures,” like dividing classes into smaller groups of students or even closing schools. She also said businesses should arrange for employees to work from home.

This is not the first time that companies in Canada and the U.S. have been forced to contemplate emergency options or devise work-from-home policies. The closest historical reference point for the spread of the coronavirus is the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003 — a crisis that prompted many companies to devise emergency-response plans.

“Companies probably have these plans in the vault someplace, and they’re probably not all that different than they were 20 years ago,” said Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School of Business.

“Just trying to understand which jobs people actually have to be in the office for to keep things going is pretty useful.”