REALITY OF RETURN
Workplace will be different when, and if, offices reopen
One year after thousands of workers were sent home, Columbus-area employers are cautiously planning to reopen offices, some as early as June.
But many of those offices will function differently than they did before the pandemic, with far more opportunities for workers to divide their time between home and office.
“We believe the future of work is somewhere in the middle, where office space is a place employees choose to come back to, to use for team building and collaboration, but aren’t required to use if they can work more effectively at home,” said Chrissy Hand, senior vice president of operations at Covermymeds, which is preparing to open its new headquarters in Franklinton.
When might Columbus-area employees go back to work?
Most central Ohio workers who packed up their desks a year ago are still working remotely, according to a Dispatch survey of more than a dozen of the region’s largest employers.
But with COVID-19 cases declining and vaccinations rising, office managers are starting to plan to bring workers back to the ranch. While few have set
dates, most are eyeing a summer return, with some, such as Nationwide, as early as June.
“We believe returning our workforce to the office in June provides time for vaccines to be widely administered, community spread to be reduced, supports parents/caregivers and will increase our confidence for a safe transition,” the insurer said.
Others, such as Huntington Bank and the library nonprofit OCLC, have been pleased with how well remote work has gone and have no concrete plans to return.
“We were among the first to close and have no desire to be the first to reopen,” said Skip Prichard, president and CEO of Dublin-based OCLC, which employs about 800 central Ohio workers.
“Productivity is high and people are performing well,” Prichard added. “Do we have the skills and capabilities and technology to manage remotely? The answer to all is a resounding yes.”
Still other companies are keeping any decision close to the vest. While Jpmorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has said he is eager to get workers back into the office, the company is mum about plans for its 20,000 Columbus employees.
“We continue to make decisions based on local circumstances and are providing flexibility for each line of business to determine how and when their team returns,” the company said in a statement to The Dispatch.
Other large central Ohio employers, including the state of Ohio, AEP, Scotts Miracle-gro and Cardinal Health, have likewise not said when they might bring workers back in, but are tracking health guidelines and statistics.
“The health and safety of our employees is our top priority, and we do not have a definitive timeline at this point,” said a statement from Cardinal Health.
“A small percentage of our employees are participating in a volunteer return to office program we formed to help test our COVID-19 office protocols. As we see vaccines become more widely available, we will look to invite more employees back to offices.”
Remote working to be permanent at some employers
At least two large central Ohio employers – Alliance Data and the health technology firm Olive – do not plan a full return to the office. The two companies, which together employ nearly 4,000 workers, say they have been so satisfied with remote working that they will continue to keep most workers home.
“Across our business, we have been pleased,” Alliance Vice President of Human Resources Brandy Sullivan said. “The performance has been steady, and in many areas we’ve seen increases in productivity. Some of that is associates being able to work distraction-free.”
Olive likewise found that earlier concerns about productivity, employee engagement and worker training proved unfounded when the company sent workers home a year ago, said Olive Chief People Officer Brian Rutkowski.
“All these theoretical objections to remote working went away,” he said.
Alliance shed much of its office space during the pandemic, and Olive dropped plans to find a new, larger headquarters.
But even Alliance and Olive are not planning to go fully remote. Instead, they are reconfiguring their existing space as a flexible environment for training, meetings and a spot for staff who prefer to work in an office.
Pandemic brings more hybrid, flexible schedules
Other companies are also re-examining how they use their offices.
Covermymeds’ new Franklinton campus, which was well underway before the pandemic, is designed for a flexible workforce, with easily movable furniture, lots of meeting rooms and outdoor work stations.
“When we return to office in the summer, we’ll continue flexible working arrangements,” said Hand, whose company employs more than 1,500 workers, most of them in Columbus. “Our staff is unlikely to all be in the buildings on the same day; they might work in a home office or a coffee shop.”
Safelite, which also employs about 1,500 workers, is eyeing a return to the office after July 1, but also expects a different work environment than before the pandemic.
“We’ve learned a lot around the most effective and efficient ways for our associates to work, and it’s not just one way,” said Ryan Trierweiler, Safelite’s executive vice president for people and leadership.
“There are types of work where our associates feel more effective, more engaged, doing in the office, and some that’s more effective when not in the office,” he said. “That’s something we can take forward, and use our office space differently in the future to focus on the work that really benefits from being done in an office.”
Safelite’s worker surveys have found that “nearly all our associates would prefer a hybrid model, some time working from home and some time working from offices,” Trierweiler said. “It depends on what you’re doing that day.”
Like Trierweiler, other central Ohio managers are carefully evaluating how a year outside the office worked, while trying to gauge how their employees feel about returning to offices.
OCLC soon will survey workers on their thoughts about returning to work, Prichard said. Like many executives interviewed by The Dispatch, he is pleased with how well remote work went and is cautious about damaging the autonomy and flexibility employees gained over the year.
“How do you bring people together while also helping people work in a way they find most productive for them?” he asked. “We have to be careful of the pendulum swinging too far either way.”
Balancing performance, culture and flexibility
According to a survey by the Cleveland-based architecture and research firm Vocon, only 12% of 102 corporate executives – the majority of them in Ohio – said they expect employees to work full-time in offices when offices reopen.
Another 44% said they expect workers to be in the office at least three days a week, while 22% said they expect workers to spend one or two days in the office (21% said they were not sure).
A year of working remotely has made it clear that many office jobs can be done from a spare bedroom or kitchen table. But as the year wore on, the shortcomings of a remote workforce also became apparent for some.
“None of our companies surveyed said they wanted to be fully remote,” said Megan Spinos, Vocon’s strategy director. “They know place always matters; there’s always a need for spaces that allow people to come together.”
Nonetheless, managers know workers are reluctant to give up the ability to work at least sometimes from their spare bedroom in sweats.
“Workers feel they are performing and they want to lay claim to their flexibility,” Spinos said. “They’re really afraid of losing some of the gains they got though this experience.”
More than 60% of employers in the Vocon survey said their staff’s performance was consistent with pre-pandemic times, while 17% said performance had increased and 21% said it had decreased.
But while managers said staff had the tools to work from home, performance suffered in other ways: 62% of companies said the pandemic presented a challenge in getting workers to connect to the company’s culture, and 58% said it made it difficult to develop and train employees.
“It’s difficult for us to be our most creative when we’re not together,” said Michael Copella, managing director of the Columbus office of the commercial real estate firm CBRE, which employs more than 200 workers. “That human interaction, that ping-ponging of information in the hallway. It’s hard to duplicate that on Zoom.”
Whatever precise road companies take back, executives know it’s going to be a strange transition for employees who have spent a year at home.
“I think people will be much more casual than before,” said Prichard, with OCLC. “I just want to make sure people don’t come into work with pajamas, and understand that showers are a good thing.”
Dispatch Reporter Mark Williams contributed to this report. jweiker@dispatch.com @Jimweiker