Workplace won’t look the same when we all return
Firms will need to reconfigure areas for distancing, and don’t rule out more work at home
As businesses around the world begin to reopen and Doug Ford offers more specifics on when and how Ontario will get back to work, one big question remains unanswered: What, exactly, will our workplaces look like when we return?
Anyone who thinks they’ll be anything like the offices, manufacturing plants, restaurants and stores we left in a hurry seven weeks ago is likely in for a shock. Not only will our workplaces look physically different and operate differently, experts say we can expect a whole new philosophy toward work — one where home life is part of the equation.
“Our work and home life have become completely immeshed, there’s no blurring of the lines anymore,” says David Zweig, an associate professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management at the University of Toronto.
And that is not necessarily a bad thing, he adds.
“We used to go in the office and it used to be ‘I’m at work, home life is at home, no one expects your home life to be interrupting your work when you’re at the office,’ ” says Zweig.
“But those walls have fallen a little bit and it’s going to be difficult to disentangle them again. And so we can all stop pretending now that our work and home life are completely separate entities — because they’re not.”
Of course, our workplaces will change physically as well. They must: It’s quite possible that we will have to design them to minimize human contact for months or years. And possibly forever.
This will impact every aspect of office, retail and restaurant design, and it will affect how we use those workplaces, too.
The 65 new regulations Ford announced last Thursday help to create a more concrete framework for the extent of the changes we’re in for.
Some businesses will have to install Plexiglas barriers, revamp heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems, use boot sanitizing trays, distribute hand sanitizer to employees and customers, enforce hand washing, hold outdoor meetings and maintain safe physical distancing.
“We’re telling our businesses how to be ready for when we get that green light,” said Ford, referring to the OK that must come from Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer for health.
What is crystal clear is that the days of offices teeming with people are over, at least for the short term, says Zweig. And trends toward hoteling and hot desking — where workers are made to share rooms, offices and cubicles to pack even more people into expensive square footages — almost are certainly gone, he adds.
“There’s no way they can go back to that kind of model given the need for social distancing.”
Instead, we should prepare for strategies such as staggering workers’ schedules so that only a portion of a workforce comes in on any given day, or splitting shifts, he says.
Maximum loads in elevators will almost certainly shift from weight to numbers of people, and experts say governments will have to mandate elevator capacities, along with social distancing lines in front of the lifts, much like those that snake into grocery and LCBO stores.
What all that means, says Richard Leblanc, a professor of government, law and ethics at York University, is that the image of the harried bankers or lawyers working late into the night in their 40th-floor offices is one of the past.
“Long term we might never go back to working 60 to 70 hours a week in an office tower,” says Leblanc. “There’s not necessarily a relationship between productivity and location of work, so the work environment has also changed.” They will now be putting in those extra hours at home.
Leblanc says companies large and small will have to set their own safety plans for reopening.
While federal, provincial and local health officials will set out the broad rules of return, every organization will have to fit those criteria into their unique circumstances.
Desk spacing, mask use, sanitizing station placements and isle usage will vary from business to business, Leblanc says.
“And that should be a plan that businesses develop right now so that when the green light is given for them to open they’ve got a robust, defensible plan,” says Leblanc.
“Governments are not experts on running businesses, the business people are. So the governments are setting the framework and the conditions” that business can adopt or not, he says.
Restaurants, for example, could lower capacity to 25 per cent or to 50 per cent depending on floor space and seating configurations — with both meeting government set distancing criteria.
“And there’s a debate right now in the airline industry about whether middle seats should be removed. Those are choices,” he says.
This shrinking will be a reversal of the business model many industries have adopted — often to great hue and cry — over the past several decades, Leblanc says.
“Over the past 10 or 20 years the strategy has been ‘let’s have as many people in the airplane or in the restaurant as we possibly can’ (and) each seat for a restaurant could be worth $10,000 a year,” he says.
“What that means is that in the new normal, prices are going to go up.”
While restaurant prices may rise, the number and size of grocery stores may shrink, with more and more people finding that online food deliveries made during pandemic isolations are actually to their liking.
“I’m going to ask myself do I really need to spend 50 hours a year going to Loblaws, as an example, to get groceries or can I spend $100 a year on a delivery fee and have groceries brought to my door once a week,” he says.
Leblanc expects many of the revisions coming to businesses and eating establishments will last.
“What happens in stressful times — and we have data from the Great Depression, for example — is that people’s behaviours change permanently,” he says.
“We may never go back to siting on a crowded airplane or in a crowded restaurant. So the sooner businesses in key industries come to the realization that their business model has changed ... the better.”
Jerry Davis, a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan, says that new-normal strategies could certainly liberate workers but may well include some dystopian elements.
Far from trusting their employees to work from home, for example, some employers may turn to communist-style surveillance, Davis says.
“I naturally always head right towards the most dark and terrible version, which is that HR and IT band together to create (an East German secret police)
Stasi system,” he says.
“You could imagine ... companies using much more intrusive forms of control because they do want to act like they trust you, but they also want to make sure that you’re not taking a nap or screwing around or watching porn on the company’s computer.”
Andrea Raso, an employment and labour lawyer with Vancouver’s Clark Wilson LLP, says that altered workplaces and employment situations will create some novel legal issues.
Company-imposed temperature surveillance, or the insistence on wearing masks in certain workplaces, for example, could create privacy concerns, Raso says.
“Privacy has to be balanced with the employers obligations under occupational health and safety legislation ... that an employer has an obligation to create a safe workplace for all of it’s employees,” she says.
“That has to be balanced against personal intrusion and so a lot of it is really going to depend on the type of workplace that you’re in.”
If a workplace forces employees into close quarters, for example, temperature monitoring and masks might be more justified than in places where everyone had their own offices, Raso says.
Another question would centre on the rights of companies to demand employees go into work if they have underlying conditions or are merely frightened to do so.
Raso says most provinces have enacted legislation that allows people with conditions that make them more susceptible to the virus to take an unpaid leave — where they’d be eligible for Employment Insurance or some other government benefit.
‘It’s a bit different if an employee just feels uncomfortable. Everybody going back to work is going to have that discomfort and that’s different,” she says.
“I don’t know that employers would be as harsh as to terminate, although there isn’t anything preventing them to do so. But it would likely mean the employee is on an unpaid leave (and would) probably not get paid at all.”
Many of the social distancing strategies brought to the workplace — shorter or split shifts, working from home, or going to the workplace less often for example — would also serve to spread out peak loads on mass transit systems, experts say.
One place social distancing strategies may not be possible, however, is in manufacturing, where assembly line placement dictates proximity to other people he says, adding Volkswagen and Tesla are both reopening their car assembly factories.
“I guess they’re finding ways to space out employees on an assembly line ... or they’re not. We’ll see how well it goes, whether it’s sustainable to have a manufacturing industry with people working closely together,” Zweig says.
However, the long-term trend — driven by primordial urges to see and touch people — could take us back to pre-pandemic workplaces, says Dirk Matten, a professor of policy at York University’s Schulich School of Business.
“It’s just part of the human condition to be face to face,” says Matten, who is also director of the school’s centre for excellence in responsible business.
Matten says many businesses will have learned from the long isolation that some meetings are more productive if held online, with more built in discipline and fewer distractions and over-talking.
“So in that sense, I think some of these isolation practices will survive,” he says. “But by and large I think we need that faceto-face connection.”
“There’s no way (firms) can go back to that kind of model given the need for social distancing.”
DAVID ZWEIG ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO