Pins, bands make statements
With workplaces reopening, subtle attire silently signals workers’ personal boundaries
Leah Mcgowen-hare wants you to know one thing about her: She is a hugger. If you just met, she’ll give you a hug. If you are a Salesforce client, she’ll give you a hug. If you are considering signing up for Salesforce’s services then you, too, are in line for a hug. She extended a virtual hug in the middle of a recent video call.
But Mcgowen-hare, a vice president at Salesforce, realized that even the people who are with her on Team Hug might have changed their calculation on what is too close for comfort these days. So for Salesforce’s convention in September — which she likened to a family reunion — she landed on a solution, something to separate the huggers from the mere fist-bumpers.
The 1,000 attendees of the San Francisco conference were greeted with three options for pins to wear. Green: OK to hug. Yellow: Let’s do the elbow/fist bump. Red: Let’s wave hello.
More than three months since Salesforce’s
conference, public health conditions have shifted; with omicron spreading fast, hugging and fist-bumping might seem even less enticing. Still, plenty of corporate workers are required to be in their offices, or are returning in the coming months with new vaccine and testing rules in place.
At some workplaces, colorful wristbands have offered a way for people emerging from nearly two years of relative isolation to silently communicate their boundaries. As an added bonus, wristband companies whose sales plunged in 2020, when events ground to a halt, are pleased to find business picking up again. A Wisconsin company, for example, has sold tens of millions of Covid-related bands to more than 3,000 organizations over the past 18 months.
For Wristband Resources, which is based outside Milwaukee, the second Friday in March 2020 was “D-day.” There were no more concerts, nor festivals or school retreats. Mike Gengler, the chief information officer, was shuttling between his home and the office, but he didn’t know what to instruct his employees to do. Sales dropped to nearly zero for the company, which has 140 people on staff.
About two weeks later, orders began to trickle in again. Gengler checked the delivery addresses to see where his wristbands were shipping and he found an unlikely culprit: commercial construction. These first-time Wristband Resources clients, which were reopening their construction sites, wanted an easy way to signify the employees who had completed their temperature screenings for the day.
It was a eureka moment for Gengler and his team, who realized the pandemic could shepherd in unexpected uses for a multicolored set of wristbands. By that summer, his company was shipping wristbands to hundreds of offices as they reopened. Wristband Resources ended 2020 without any losses in online retailing; Covid-related wristbands made up about 60% of its revenue. The company finished 2021 with better online sales than it had in 2019.
Businesses that want more high-tech COVID protective measures have choices. Cisco, for example, which has made its return to the office optional, equipped its conference rooms with technology that notifies people when they have exceeded the maximum occupancy limit.
But some executives said they have found it easiest to let workers communicate their office comfort levels, and colorful wristbands allow for that tailored approach. Workers can elect for green wristbands one week, then swap out for red ones the next.