San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Returning to the office will require a lot of work
As the Bay Area gradually loosens stayathome orders, Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, is getting ready for a new coronavirus reality.
The company has more than 9,000 employees ostensibly assigned to work in three large towers at Salesforce Tower, 50 Fremont St. and 350 Mission St. Before the pandemic, they were highenergy places, with crammed elevators and filledup desks.
When office workers are allowed to return — city health officials have not given a date — the offices will be different.
There will be temperature scans on every floor, mandatory masks, and 6foot separations for all workers. Hand sanitizer will be every
where and cleaners will work throughout the day.
“We’re taking a very careful, phased approach” said Elizabeth Pinkham, Salesforce’s executive vice president of global real estate. “It’s going to be more controlled” than the precoronavirus days.
Work areas and conferences rooms may operate with less than half the normal occupancy. Elevators are a “choke point” and will be limited to only a few people at a time, and teams will come in at staggered times, Pinkham said.
The elevator challenge is an example of the downsides of density, particularly in the highrise offices that tech companies have flocked to in the Transbay district, though Pinkham said “we remain committed more than ever to San Francisco.”
Salesforce is also testing clear glass dividers between desks and touchless key systems, along with looking at copper and brass surfaces that kill many microbes.
A small core team will first reboot the office infrastructure before more workers will be allowed to come back. But not everyone will return this year.
Some Salesforce workers want to work from home for the rest of 2020, which the company is allowing, but there are others who are eager to get back into the office, Pinkham said.
Other tech giants such as Facebook and Google have said most employees can work from home for the remainder of 2020. Twitter went further and said they can work from home forever, unless their tasks require them to be at work.
“It’s a whole new world. You feel like you’re truly reimagining every single aspect,” Pinkham said. “No one has a clear answer right now. I know we’re going to learn so much from this.”
The clear winner during coronavirus has been the practice of working from home. The Bay Area Council, a business group, surveyed 123 companies last week and found that when offices reopen, nearly 90% expect to have partial remote work, while nearly 18% expect to have all employees working remotely. Twothirds expect to rotate or alternate schedules so only some workers come in during the week. “We’ve been somewhat shocked by how seamless the transition has been” to working from home, said Olin McKenzie, a director at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a global architecture firm.
At the same time, architects believe the office is not obsolete. It’s a “social engine” that allows workers to collaborate more effectively than just being online, said Julia Murphy, a director at SOM.
“We believe ever more passionately in the collaborative and social aspect of the office,” she said.
Along with safety measures, SOM’s clients have renewed focus on upgrading systems like air filtration and allowing in more sunlight, and placing a premium on terraces and rooftops for work.
“The very notion of workplace has been disrupted,” said Randy Howder, a managing director in San Francisco at Gensler, a major architectural firm. “As we’ve broken work and being in a specific place, I think we’re going to see more choices, flexibility.”
He sees the office of the future more focused on common spaces for collaboration and engagement, and less about individuals focusing on solitary tasks, which could be done at home.
“It’s a great opportunity for companies to question everything,” he said.
For companies with cafeterias, instead of numerous food stations with shared serving utensils, companies could shift to more hospitalitystyle meals where food is brought to them, he said.
The coronavirus could push more companies to have dispersed satellite offices, rather than concentrating all workers at a single location, he said. A megacampus has been popular in Silicon Valley, but many tech giants have grown elsewhere.
Salesforce’s Pinkham said it isn’t clear how the virus will affect the company’s expansion.
Allison Arieff, editorial director of Bay Area think tank SPUR, said she believes cubicles will make a comeback.
She also expects offices will remain partially empty for the foreseeable future.
“The idea that everybody had to be there at the same time in one huge room seems completely impossible,” she said. “I think there will be a big reevaluation with the caveat, I don’t think people will never go into an office again.”
Arieff said she hopes the crisis will lead to improvements. She would like to see San Francisco allow more flexible uses in empty retail spaces — for example, making them small offices that would help disperse employees.
“We’ve got to seize this opportunity,” she said.
“Rather than look at this crisis as the end of something, it’s really the potential of the beginning of something better,” said Howder of Gensler. “We can lament the end of an era, but from a design perspective, it’s more productive to think, what can a better future look like?”