Area offices in no rush to have workers return
A month into the green phase of the state’s reopening plan, office workers in southwestern Pennsylvania have begun trickling back to the workplace.
Far from being in a rush, companies are proceeding with caution, and for good reason. According to health experts, among the riskiest places for catching the virus are enclosed spaces with poor ventilation where people congregate for extended periods of time — such as open office settings and at restaurants.
Like just about every other office employer in the Pittsburgh region, North Shorebased Peoples Natural Gas sent office staff home to work when the novel coronavirus set in.
On June 15, the company began bringing its roughly 260 headquarters staffers back in phases. The final group is set to return starting Monday.
Under Pennsylvania’s green phase rules, remote work is “strongly encouraged,” but Peoples decided to recall employees in an effort to return to more normal operations — as long as it could be done safely, according to safety director Ruth Werne, noting that exceptions are being made for employees with medical conditions or child care issues.
“We are continually monitoring the situation as far as COVID-19 trends,” she said. The company — which occupies five floors in its building — is prepared to scale back the number of workers in the office if there is a “concerning trend.” So far, a record high number of daily cases being reported in Allegheny County in recent days has not curtailed those plans, a spokesman said.
Following state guidelines, masks are mandatory in Peoples’ offices, unless people are working in isolation, Ms. Werne said. Handsanitizing stations have been set up, and employees are being asked to eat lunch at their desks instead of gathering in a lunchroom.
Peoples also is pilot testing a thermal scanner at the entrance to the North Shore building that scans employees’ faces to confirm they are wearing a mask. The scanner also takes employees’ temperatures. (Temperature checks can help spot coronavirus infections but miss asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic people who may be able to transmit the virus.)
A number of other employers in the region are taking a more cautious approach with office staff: waiting for clearer data on how the pandemic is playing out.
At PNC Financial Services Group — the region’s and the state’s biggest bank — the work-at-home order remains in place.
“PNC continues to monitor the impact of the COVID19 pandemic and to require employees who have been doing so already — in Pittsburgh and across our national footprint — to remain on their remote work schedules,” spokesman Jason Beyersdorfer said in an email.
PNC employs about 52,000 people nationwide, including some 12,500 in the Pittsburgh region. The majority of the company’s non-customer-facing workforce is working remotely, including “nearly all” employees at its corporate headquarters in Downtown and its call center at Firstside Center on First Avenue, Mr. Beyersdorfer said.
At Bank of New York Mellon, employees are being told they will continue to work remotely at least until September. “We are taking a very conservative and measured approach as we evaluate return to office plans,” spokeswoman Madelyn McHugh wrote in an email.
Approximately 95% of the New York-based company’s global workforce of 47,900 people are working from home, she said. BNY Mellon employs thousands of workers in the Pittsburgh region, but Ms. McHugh declined to give a specific number.
Regional health care giant Highmark Health on Wednesday scuttled plans to begin recalling a limited number of office workers across its Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia footprint due to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases in many locations across the country, including in Allegheny County, spokeswoman Janice Maszie said in an email.
Highmark Health — the parent company of insurer Highmark Inc. and the Allegheny Health Network — was scheduled to bring back about 1,200 of its roughly 10,000 non-clinical employees who have been working from home starting on July 6.
That plan is now delayed indefinitely, Ms. Maszie said.
Even before the pullback, Highmark had told most of its non-clinical staffers that they would be working from home at least through Labor Day.
Studying work-from-home
Although most workfrom-home plans began as a temporary measure, the virus likely has changed the way some people work for good.
“There are a lot of employees who prefer to work from home, which I understand,” said Ms. Werne, of Peoples Gas. “You are limiting your commute and have more time in your day.”
The company is considering adding a permanent work-from-home option, she said. “No decisions have been made.”
According to a study released in early June by Global Workplace Analytics, a whopping 97% of office workers in the U.S. said they were working from their homes. Some 82% wanted to continue, at least part of the time, after the pandemic.
If employers agree, demand for office space in the U.S. could plummet by over 1 billion square feet, the study said.
At Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, based at the RIDC Thorn Hill Industrial Park straddling the Allegheny/Butler county line, “We are discovering that telework is actually working well for some of our jobs,” human resources vice president Susan Renda said. “We are using this temporary work-at-home phase to look at whether this is something we can continue in the future.”
At the beginning of June, when the green phase began, the company started to loosen restrictions on coming to the office. “Some of our work requires collaboration that was easier to do in the office than from home,” Ms. Renda said.
“We are still on a temporary work-from-home basis, but we are being more flexible,” she said, calling it the company’s “lime green” phase. “Employees can work maybe a few days [at the office] and the rest at home.”
There’s another reason for the company’s slow approach to bringing people back. “We don’t want to bring everyone back and have Pennsylvania announce we are going back to yellow because of a COVID19 outbreak again,” she said.
Mitsubishi Electric occupies five buildings at the RIDC location, plus two buildings nearby. Most employees work in their own isolated spaces, Ms. Renda said. “Many companies embraced an open office design. We did not,” she said.
Besides implementing the typical mitigation measures, the company took steps to improve air quality in its buildings during the pandemic. “We increased the exchange of fresh air and upgraded all of our air filters,” and installed portable air filtering units in conference rooms, Ms. Renda said.
Never going back?
While some area workers prepare to go back to the office, others will never be returning.
Optum, a health care company on the North Side, sent its roughly 20 employees home in mid-March.
Now, even a vaccine won’t bring them back.
The company had been considering shuttering its office and going remote before the pandemic. When COVID-19 struck and workers were forced home, that sealed the deal.
Before the pandemic, some 35% of employees worked remotely at least part time throughout Optum’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group based in suburban Minneapolis, a spokesman said.
“The company has a long history of flexible work schedules,” he said, noting some of the advantages include saving on rent, furniture and parking subsidies, in addition to retaining employees.
“Increased efficiency is observed when work-fromhome arrangements are done right,” he said.