San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
S.A. companies consider a hybrid return
As employers find ways to get back to the office, some want to keep work arrangements flexible
RVK Architects of San Antonio has a new line of business: Helping companies remodel their offices with socially distanced floor plans.
Six clients have hired the firm to help them find ways to safety return employees to their office desks, said Christina Davis, who oversees the firm’s interior design studio. The matter might be as simple as staggering the employees’ work schedules so no two are sitting close to each other at one time, she said. In other cases, the companies might have to install new technology to conduct web meetings, or to buy mobile furniture so employees can hold impromptu meetings in an open office rather than in tight conference rooms. Sometimes, walls need to come down.
“One of the big things people want to know is, what is everyone else doing in the city? Whenever I talk to a particular client, they’re like, ‘Are we doing it the same as other people?’ ” Davis said. “My answer, always, is that there is not a right or wrong answer as far as how you bring people back … Every company has to decide to do things for themselves, and it’s going to be a response to, ‘What is the work that we do, and how do we need to do our best work?’ ”
More than a year after the initial COVID-19 lockdown sent workers home, and with over 571,000 Bexar County residents now fully vaccinated against the virus, local companies are considering ways to get their employees back into the office, where they can more easily collaborate with their coworkers. In line with a nationwide trend, many are looking at adopting hybrid models in which employees would work some days at home and others at the office.
At Broadway Bank, 50 percent of corporate employees are now coming into the office on any given day, and the company plans to be operating normally in July, CEO David Bohne said. The company has created a task force that is coming up with guidelines for a new working environment that will likely include flexible working arrangements.
“Ultimately, that’s what we’re looking to do: How do we create a workspace that maintains our culture, our creativity, our innovation, our camaraderie?” Bohne said. “It all comes down to balance. What does workforce flexibility look like? What can we do for our employees to create a work environment that allows us and them to be flexible?”
Some possibilities could be that employees would work from home one or two days a week, or work from home in the mornings, he said.
“We know needs come up, we know emergencies come up; but in the day-in day-out, we want to make sure they do have the flexibility to meet their family needs but also their business needs,” he said.
At USAA, only about 5 percent of employees have returned to the office, Pat Teague, the company’s chief human resources officer, said in a statement. In May, USAA plans to begin presenting employees with a choice, depending on their position, of working only in the office, only at home, or in the office some days and at home on others.
The company has adopted new safety measures including socially distanced desks, and is using a mobile app developed by employees as part of a health screening process.
“Working together in a physical location pays great benefits in building our USAA culture and sense of community,” Teague said. “We also know our employees value flexibility in how and where they work as well as the balance they’ve been able to achieve working at home.”
At Frost Bank, as employees get vaccinated, some are choosing to divide their time between working remotely and being in the office, spokesman Bill Day said in an email. The company has asked its departments to keep their occupancy levels below 75 percent.
“Like every other employer, we’re studying the possibilities of what the future workplace will be like,” he said.
A survey published in January by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 83 percent of employers said the shift to remote working had been successful for their companies. Most said they planned to adopt hybrid working models after the pandemic eases.
But employers still placed importance on communal office working, with 68 percent saying a typical employee should be in the office at least three days a week to achieve a distinct company culture.
There also was support among employees for working remotely, with 55 percent saying they would prefer to work at home at least three days a week. Yet 87 percent of employees said the office was important for collaborating with coworkers.
One concern about working remotely is that new employees will have trouble building relationships and assimilating into a company’s culture, said Cristina Banks, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces at the University of California, Berkeley.
“We don’t have spontaneous interactions with people over a water cooler, the various versions of that, and that’s essential for people feeling the culture of an organization and feeling committed to that organization, feeling their importance for being part of that culture,” she said. “It doesn’t just come from an online training program. The lifeblood of the company is the mix of people, the spontaneous interactions.”
A big question for companies using a hybrid model is whether they can “curate” the employees who are present in the office so they still have these spontaneous interactions, she said.
After working from home for much of the last year, Americans are coming back to their offices with different expectations, Banks said.
Many don’t want to go back to enduring long commutes back and forth, she said. On top of that, employees are coming out of the pandemic more emboldened to look for work elsewhere or start their own company. In response, companies across the U.S. are adopting a “hub-and-spoke” model in which they open satellite offices closer to employees’ neighborhoods, often in flexible work spaces such as WeWork.
“They have felt some autonomy from the mothership is the way I put it, and that makes people reluctant to come under control of the mothership again,” Banks said. “The effect of that is that the talent that companies were able to recruit and hire may be not so anxious to go back to that company when the dust settles. The shift in power is real.”
Representatives of USAA and Broadway said they are encouraging employees to get vaccinated but not requiring it. Banks said many companies are worried about the legal implications of requiring vaccines — whether it might be considered discrimination if an employee decides not to be vaccinated due to religious objections, for example.
During the pandemic, Broadway Bank has ramped up its resources to employees for physical health and stress management, with events such as virtual recipe demonstrations and 5K races, said Rhonda McGown, the company’s chief strategy officer. The company had health programs before the pandemic but has been able to use technology to make them available to more employees than before.
“We are ramping up some of the resources that we want to give to our employees and their families just to help take care of not only the physical attributes but the mental well-being and stress management as well. It’s just been such a crazy time, I think, and people are trying to figure out how to adapt.”