San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
EYEING A RETURN
As California eases shut down restrictions, what’s next for the office crowd in San Diego County?
After nearly six months of working from home, many white-collar office workers in San Diego are eyeing their old work spaces, wondering when — if ever — they’ll return to cubicles, conference rooms and water-cooler chatter.
The state’s recent update to reopening rules eased restrictions on many industries, allowing places such as restaurants, salons and pet groomers to reopen their indoor operations (at least partially) in San Diego. But the new rules tightened restrictions on offices.
Back in June, non-essential offices were allowed to reopen, although state officials asked employers to encourage teleworking when feasible. But now, as San Diego County falls into the state’s “red tier” rules, non-essential offices must again be closed, with staffers working remotely.
As the year’s uncertainty stretches on, some employers are wondering about the future of their office lives. When is it time to start making plans to return? After all, many industries have already gone back to a semblance of normalcy after adjusting to new state guidelines around distancing and sanitation. For others, the question is: When is it time to fully embrace remote work, relinquishing office space once and for all?
It’s a conversation increasingly pushed by the workers themselves. Part of the workforce is content — even elated — to be working from home. They want to know their freedoms will remain once the threat of COVID-19 softens. Other workers are getting noisy about their dissatisfaction working full time without a proper office space. They’re hitting up managers daily, petitioning to get a plan in order to return to the office, once rules allow.
“There’s a divide when it comes to how people feel about safety,” said Anna Crowe, who owns and runs a communications firm in San Diego called Crowe PR. “I want my people to be safe. But there’s something to be said for the emotional toll that working from home has taken on people who do not want that. I want my employees to have a choice, and I want to be respectful of their comfort level.”
Increasingly, employers are choosing to survey their workers to see where employees fall on this spectrum. With such information in hand, they can start making plans for how they’ll move forward.
Does anyone want to return to the office?
Some larger surveys, spanning several companies, see a near 50/50 split on worker opinions. Half want to return to the office, and the other half prefer to stay at home. But each company will have a different breakdown.
Sony, which employs thousands of people in San Diego, surveyed its entire workforce, said Mike Fasulo, president of Sony North America. Two big questions put to workers focused on productivity and happiness. About 75 percent of Sony’s workforce was both happy and productive at home, while 25 percent were unhappy, stressed and less productive at home.
“We’ve been laser-focused on that 25 percent,” Fasula said, explaining that it’s a significant chunk of the company’s workforce who are now dissatisfied and unproductive.
Due to its massive size, Sony isn’t able to address each employee’s individual concerns. But it’s finding clusters of similar issues shared by lots of workers, and is forming groups to solve the common problems. Fasulo said Sony has made an effort to include leaders in those groups who are experiencing the problems personally, as it’s hard to make decisions from a place of ignorance.
“I’m older, my children are out of the house, and I have an office at home,” Fasulo said. “My biggest distraction is my dog. I wouldn’t be the right guy to express his opinion on a working parent with schoolage children, or a single parent with daycare needs. I’m not in that situation.”
Doug Walker, who manages human resource services in San Diego for HR company Insperity, said the COVID-19 pandemic has created a whole slew of new problems for many of his corporate clients. Employee concerns, he’s finding, are widening well beyond the conventional HR issues. Some workers struggle more than others with health and safety concerns, while others face unique issues with merging home and work life. His advice is to remain flexible, Walker said.
“Some companies are even allowing employees not to work regular hours, for example, allowing them to work weekends instead of weekdays because of childcare issues,” Walker said.
But for those wanting to return to a physical office space, complications abound.
How exactly are companies returning to the office?
Office parks in San Diego are looking livelier these days compared to the earliest months of the pandemic, indicating that at least a trickle of in-person, whitecollar work is returning. How is that possible while in-person office work is still banned by the state? It gets complicated, but basically many local companies fit into one of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors that deem them “essential.” Think biotech, medical device, energy, telecommunications, and more — all big industries in San Diego and all considered essential.
Some of these offices never shut down at all. Others reduced their in-person capacity to the bare minimum, but have allowed workers back inside slowly based on evolving company and employee needs.
In many ways, these offices are paving the way for the rest of the white-collar workforce, as they’ve been muscling through new pandemic-inspired problems for months now. Solutions are being worked out in-person while the rest of us Zoom from home.
Walker, the HR pro, said safety has to be the first priority for companies returning to the office.
“Companies will want to make sure they’ve taken every precaution they can to make the workspace as safe as possible,” Walker said.
Solana Beach-based Flock Freight, which makes supply chain shipping software, is one such company. Although most of its workforce worked remotely in the early days of the pandemic, about 25 percent of staffers are now back in person. The office space has been outfitted with all the COVID-19 gear, such as temperaturetaking stations at the doors, sneeze guard barriers between work stations, and hands-free foot pulls on bathroom doors.
But returning to the office brought fresh, unexpected issues to work out, said Jeff Lerner, vice president of marketing for Flock Freight.
“One of the big questions that kept coming up was, ‘What are the rules of the break room?’” Lerner said. “Do we continue supplying coffee and kombucha and all the perks people used to enjoy? Do we allow people to wash personal dishes in the sink?”
For now, the company has decided to limit touch points, instead offering grab-and-go snacks and drinks.
At Truvian Sciences, a San Diego company working on technology for a rapid blood test, leaders have purchased new patio furniture and thrown open a large garage door conveniently located in the break room.
“Now, people can go outside to work or safely social distance while on break, and that is big,” said Katherine Atkinson, chief commercial officer at Truvian.
Executives also installed a piece of technology at the front door called the Meridian Personnel Management Kiosk. The equipment looks like a camera-enabled tablet on a pedestal, which scans employees’ body temperature and checks their faces for properly worn masks. If an employee has a fever or isn’t wearing a mask, the front door won’t unlock.
Solving more problems than safety
These companies, however, have stumbled into fresh issues just by implementing safety rules. At Truvian, in-office employees aren’t just physically distanced six feet apart. Teams that used to work in huddles are now divided up and spread out across the building, as leaders hoped to prevent an entire critical team from getting sick at once.
Splitting up teams from their close colleagues, along with facial coverings, shutting down common areas, and fewer meetings, has affected the mood in the office.
“It changed the culture a bit,” Atkinson said. “We were very proud of the culture we had, but when people were going to separate rooms and not sitting with their teams, we had to do a lot of other things to ensure we didn’t lose our culture entirely.”
Truvian regularly brings street vendors to the parking lot, where employees can eat and chat outside. They recently did an art project together outdoors in which each employee got his or her own set of tools for painting.
“When we put all the canvases together, it creates one big picture,” Atkinson said.
Crowe, the PR entrepreneur, said being physically distanced for so long has also strained her team, which used to thrive in creative, social spaces. Now, she’s coordinating things like kayaking excursions, where teammates can socialize but also be outdoors and distanced.
For now, while state rules remain in flux and COVID-19 cases fluctuate, HR expert Walker said the best things companies can do is be available to employees, and respond to common issues with new solutions. That might mean making office spaces extra safe with air filtration units or staggered shifts. Or it might mean providing athome workers with dual monitors and a monthly budget of $50 to $100 to cover things like Wifi and supplies.
“People have to know you care,” he said. “That means checking in regularly. You want people to do their best, and they can with the right resources.”