San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. firm reopening in altered workspace
each day. “I felt like I was surrounded by people despite being alone.”
Office Manager and Executive Assistant Alexandra Chan can relate. She lives with five family members and found herself essentially locked away in her room during the pandemic.
“We sat down and were like, ‘We’ve got to leave each other alone for these hours of the day,’ ” Chan said. “‘If anyone needs to contact each other, just text.’ ”
That environment led to Chan jumping at the chance to return to the office in March — at limited capacity and with employees wearing masks, when San Francisco moved to the less restrictive orange tier of coronavirus restrictions.
Even with a bandage rigging her mask to her nose to stop her glasses from fogging, Chan was happy to be in the office, or just out of the house.
“Initially, I think people were excited (to come back) regardless if we had to wear masks or not,” she said.
As office manager, she set up a thermometer station, questionnaires, hand sanitizer dispensers and the rest of the accoutrements of the COVIDera office, much of which is no longer necessary with vaccines now widely available.
Whatever initial desire there was to go back in person starting in March seems to have tapered off somewhat, with most of the company’s employees working from somewhere other than the San Francisco office on most days. With hiring outside the Bay Area and some employees relocating temporarily or permanently, the workforce is increasingly more remote than in person, although employees have begun to trickle into the office more in recent weeks.
Across the nation, workers are still mixed on whether and when they want to come back to the office. The Society for Human Resource Management found in a survey of 1,000 U.S. workers that about half would work from home for good if allowed. The survey did not break down the respondents by industry.
What seems important to employees at Fast and other companies is being able to choose where to work. Apple and Google are among tech companies eyeing a fall rise in required inoffice time, despite the potential to create friction for workers who have adapted
to the zerominute commute.
Once vaccinations became widely available, Fast’s human resources, legal and other departments grappled with what the policy would be for who had to get the shots.
“Should it just be people coming into the office? Should we add travel or meeting with other people?” said Jason Alderman, the company’s communications chief. He said the consensus was to encourage vaccinations in every way possible without totally requiring them for all employees, and that Holland, the CEO signed off on the approach with little hesitation.
Requiring vaccinations for inperson activities “was a pretty simple decision in that it is the best way we can keep people safe,” Holland said.
Once the company put its policy in place this year, Chan also worked on developing Fast’s process for verifying who was vaccinated.
The twostep process involves a company called FirstVitals verifying each person’s vaccination card through a database, then uploading that information to a software called Skynet so the Fast team members can see who might have an issue with their card or who isn’t fully vaccinated, having passed the twoweek mark after their second shot or first shot of a singledose vaccine.
Even with careful verification, Fast is large enough that a small number of employees are refusing to get vaccinated. Holland said that decision was up to those employees, but that it would limit those people to their essential work duties that they’d have to do remotely. With much of the company vaccinated, Fast has also been flying teams — like leadership or communications cohorts — to locations across the U.S. this summer to meet in person for the first time since the pandemic started. For some it’s the first chance they had to meet any of their coworkers in person. Holland said the meetings are central to building personal rapport when people are so frequently apart.
The hesitancy on the part of some employees to get vaccinated has made Chan’s work planning the meetings in locations such as Hawaii, Florida and New York more complicated.
“We had an employee reach out and say, ‘Hey, I’m not vaccinated. But I really want to go to the summit,’ ” Chan said. She told the person only fully vaccinated people could go and that a live stream and a recording of all the events would be available. But the employee persisted, saying there would be no risk to vaccinated people and repeating a common refrain of the vaccinehesitant that the shots are being given under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s fastermoving emergency use authorization authority.
“I, again, had to be very firm with our policy,” Chan said. After she reiterated the policy, the conversation ended.
Not every kerfuffle over vaccines has resulted in a disagreement.
Nele Heinemann works on the communications team based in Fast’s San Francisco
“Initially, I think people were excited (to come back).”
office. After being hired remotely in December and a long period of virtual isolation with her husband in their home in Palo Alto, she was happy to have the chance to get back to an inperson setting.
She headed into the office after her second vaccine dose, but was sent home by Chan because the twoweek immunitybuilding period hadn’t yet passed. “For me it was reassuring,” Heinemann said. “Now that I’m back at the office I feel safe.”
That safety is crucial to getting back to inperson work, but it doesn’t quite bring back the prepandemic office environment. Alderman, the communications chief, said he misses the days when Holland, the CEO, could stand in the middle of the room and make an announcement to the whole company. “We’re not in the same room; we’re in different time zones,” he said. That dynamic is still a little odd. But other than that, it feels very prepandemic.”
Alderman said “there was more buzz” in the office when it was full of people chatting and tapping away at their keyboards. He echoed a common sentiment of the hybrid work setting that fewer people packed into the office meant less room for impromptu conversations with coworkers or the chance to ask a questions about a project.
The loss of social bonds normally forged by the camaraderie of solving problems together in person makes planning inperson meetups more important for companies such as Fast, with people working all over. The company hasn’t seen a drop in productivity in the past year, but with hiring and growth across the map, Holland said leadership has to keep finding ways to bring people together beyond just work.
Despite the emptying out of the San Francisco office, Holland said he still sees a place for the permanent space as the company grows away from its physical roots. “Not only do we have no intention of getting rid of our current space ... we intend to open more space,” he said, adding that he sees those locations not so much as meeting spaces but as a “private coworking space for Fast employees.”
How much employees like Chan, the office manager, use those spaces after adjusting to the social isolation of the pandemic remains to be seen. She said she’s been relearning some of the finer points of the hugs and handshakes that come with seeing a lot more people in the flesh.
At times, Chan said, it can still be a bit too much. After the first two nights of the Hawaii meeting, “I had to hide away and recharge and go to sleep early.”