To hug or not to hug, that’s the new question
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, known as Dreamforce, 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.
“Before someone came in I’d be like ‘hold up, let me see and get ready,’” McGowen-Hare said, scooching back in her seat and mimicking the onceover she would give attendees as she located their pins. “It was kind of fun. Like even though I was green, that doesn’t mean my green tops your yellow right? Whatever I did, I just did it with a lot of energy.”
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.
Crisis breeds innovation, and the difficulties of conducting in-person business during the pandemic have exposed office workers to a tactic once reserved mostly for camp counselors, or bosses with capture the flag captain energy: color coding.
Employers who want workers to come back to their desks are trying to accommodate different degrees of COVID risk tolerance. One approach they’ve landed on is offering people accessories — wristbands or pins — that signal their preferences for social distancing, masking and shaking hands.
Preserving personal space in the office isn’t a challenge unique to this moment. Still, the pandemic has given the task higher stakes, especially for employees who may feel professional pressure to get face time with their bosses.
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 teammates, who realized that 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.
“We’re going out for a laser tag event to celebrate,” Gengler said. “I’m proud we stayed true to who we were while a lot of our competitors chased PPE products.”
Gengler said that because of the holiday slowdown in business, it was too early to see how omicron would affect sales, though he added that some companies might use wristbands for identification purposes as their vaccine mandates take effect.
At Clyde & Co, an international law firm, the wristband strategy provided a measure of relief for team members who were apprehensive about the interpersonal complexities of in-person work. The firm had required its more than 2,000 employees in Britain to return to the office two days a week starting in September, though after recent government guidance those staff members are now working from home again.
The behavioral changes that the wristbands encouraged were subtle but comforting, Clyde & Co’s team members said.