For business leaders, office space issues loom as return-to-work time gets closer
The grand work-from-home experiment of the past year is giving way to a massive reconfiguration of real estate.
Cube farms are being denuded to make way for open spaces that encourage collaboration and social distancing. Rolling monitors and whiteboards on wheels are replacing inflexible and stuffy meeting rooms. And some employees want to continue working at home, at least some of the time, even when offices can reopen.
Minneapolis-based Target Corp. recognized that prospect when it announced last week that it will shed nearly 1 million square feet of space it leases in City Center. It expects the 3,500 employees who worked in that skyscraper before the pandemic to mix with 8,000 or so others at three other buildings — and at home.
Many business leaders and owners, after seeing their workers succeed away from the office, have been pondering the same questions about space. In recent years, some companies spent a lot of money giving their offices more appeal to attract workers in what was an ultratight labor market before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was kind of bad timing for us because we had just moved into this beautiful new office space, which we created for our employees, and now our employees are very comfortable working at home,” said Cale Johnston, CEO of Clickswitch, a financial-tech firm in Minneapolis. “And I don’t think they ever want to come back to the office.”
Competition for top recruits was a major reason Minneapolis-based Qumu Corp. decided last year to cut out of its lease at its North Loop headquarters, shut down offices in England and India and go to fully remote work.
“It opens up so many doors for us,” said Jason Karp, Qumu’s chief commercial officer. “We’re not limited to a specific geography for recruiting. We are a global market now.”
At Prime Therapeutics, executives are so certain that remote work is here to stay that they decided to give up a sizable office in Bloomington and relocate 700 workers to its headquarters in Eagan when the pandemic abates. That shaves one-third of Prime Therapeutic’s real estate footprint in the Twin Cities.
In an arrangement the company calls “hub and home,” 2,200 executives, managers and workers will rotate through the Eagan location during set days of the week or month. Employees will be expected to work remotely 50 to 60% of the time.
“Every team gets access to a hub, which is a collection of spaces,” said Kim Gibson, who leads Prime Therapeutics’ real estate and facilities division. “They go to the same area on their scheduled days, they can meet with their teammates, everybody knows what day of the week your team is there. On days you’re not there, a different team rolls in and uses that same space. It’s just like alternating the schedules.”
A team researching returnto-work options at Prime sought input from 300 managers and workers, Gibson said. But the impetus, she said, was “grassroots.”
Twice-yearly surveys showed that nearly everyone was adjusting well to working from home. Two-thirds of its workforce of 3,800 hoped for “some sort of balance” between working remotely and returning to the office. The most enthusiastic response came from workers at headquarters and Bloomington.
“That was eye-opening for us,” Gibson said.
Allen Hershkowitz won’t use the word “safe” because there is no certainty in life sciences. But the 65-yearold PH.D. with decades of environmental science experience says he would feel comfortable going to a socially distanced indoor sporting event with one of his children.
“Given the protocols, I would feel OK about it,” he said.
Arena by arena, venue by venue, fans are returning to watch live sports indoors amid encouraging signs during the pandemic. Plenty of safety rules are in place for the NCAA Tournament that opens in Indiana this week with limited attendance in the stands, just like the NBA and NHL. Experts say attending is relatively safe because of how big arenas with high ceilings work to move and mix air — as long as capacity limits allow for physical distancing and masks are still worn properly.
“If we’re talking about reduced capacity, people wearing masks most of the time and making use of that large volume, I think the risks are probably very low,” said Dr. Richard Corsi, dean of Portland State’s college of engineering and computer science. “If you’re sitting with your family and you’re distanced from others and people are wearing masks except for when they’re eating a hot dog or whatever, and you’ve got this large volume and you make use of the volume, my guess is that the risk is pretty low. Doesn’t mean it’s zero.”
The reduced risk of contracting the coronavirus has to do with how much space surrounds each person when venue attendance is capped at 25%, as it is for the tournament, and how often fresh air from outside is refreshed into a venue.
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers sets standards for how many cubic feet per meter of air space is required for everything from homes to restaurants to office buildings. Limiting capacity gives everyone more air.
“If you’re running at it half-full, everyone gets twice as much ventilation,” said ME Engineers managing partner Ed Bosco, who has consulted with major sports leagues and helped evaluate more than 30 arenas in the past year. “If you’re running it at 10% full, everyone gets 10 times the ventilation air.”
Then there’s how often that air is changed out. While an airplane does over 20 air changes per hour because of its confined space and predictable ventilation patterns, a sports arena can do between five and seven air changes per hour. Harvard’s John Spengler has recommended to school districts four to five per hour for the return of students.
“To have a venue the size of Staples Center or (Madison Square) Garden or Barclays doing five full air exchanges per hour, that’s quite extraordinary,” said Hershkowitz, co-chair of the International WELL Building Institute Advisory for Sports and Entertainment Venues, who also is an adviser for the NBA and Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees.
Some older buildings have had their systems retrofitted or fixed to ensure maximum air changes and good “mixing” of that air into the rafters away from people, though most constructed in the past 20-plus years were already capable of high-quality ventilation.
“At the time, those things weren’t done, per se, for pandemic-based scenarios,” said Ryan Sickman, global director of sports at the Gensler architecture firm. “But they were done for very similar things. It was cleaner, it was removing bacteria from the air, it was removing particulates from the air. It was providing for a vast number of people clean air, and that’s an important part of the experience.”