Like COVID-19 infections on the rise in the United States, many jobs remain empty or operate with skeleton teams.
Most agree that the decision to return to the office should involve a combination of officials, scientists, government officials and doctors and scientists who have a profound knowledge of COVID-19 and infectious diseases in general. The exact timing will depend on many factors, including the willingness of the government to open up, the experts' vision of the current conditions, the tolerance of the corporate leadership towards risk (or how reasonable it is to manage the business remotely), where it is located your business and current conditions there.
This does not mean that any company that can open up the will, but if and when they get the go-ahead, they can at least start bringing back a percentage of employees. But what might appear is clouded in great uncertainty around commuters, office population density and distance, the use of elevators, how much you can reasonably clean in depth, what it might mean to have a mask for eight hours a day and many other factors .
To get an idea of how tech companies are looking at it, we talked to several executives to get their perspective. Most have not seen more than a small percentage of employees return to the office this year. But to get a more complete picture, we also talked to an infectious disease doctor and a government official to get their perspectives.
Taking it slowly
While there are some guidelines out there to help companies, most of the executives we talked to found that while in-person interactions were lacking, they were happy to take things slowly and were more concerned about putting staff at risk. do not rush to return to normal operations.
Iman Abuzeid, CEO and co-founder of Incredible Health, a startup that helps hospitals find and hire nurses, said his company was semi-remote even before COVID-19 was launched, but the team is now completely remote. Whenever the mayor of San Francisco gives the go-ahead, he says he will reopen the office, but the company's 30 employees will have the opportunity to continue working remotely.
Emphasize that for some employees, working at home has proved very demanding. "I want to highlight two groups that are quite important that need to be highlighted in this narrative. Firstly, we have employees with very young children and schools are closed, so working at home forever or even for the rest of this year is not really an option, so the second group is the employees who are in apartments. younger, and they "have roommates and it is not comfortable to work at home," explained Abuzeid.
Those people will have to go to the office whenever it's allowed, he said. For Lindsay Grenawalt, Chief People Officer of Cockroach Labs, an 80-person database launched in New York, said that at this point there must be a very compelling reason to bring people back to the office.
