Welcome back to work. The corporate cafeteria is closed. The coffee makers are unplugged. And the desks are separated by plastic.
Every part of office life is being re-examined in the era of Covid-19. When employees file back into American workplaces—some wearing masks—many will find the office transformed, human-resources and real-estate executives say.
Elevators may only take one person at a time. Desks, once tightly packed in open floor plans, will be spread apart, with some covered by plastic shields and chairs atop disposable pads to catch germs. The beer taps, snack containers, coffee bars and elaborate gyms and showers that once set high-dollar, white-collar environments apart will likely remain closed to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Many changes won’t go away until the virus does.
The office adaptations reverse a decadeslong push in American corporations to cram workers into tighter spaces, with few separations between colleagues. Companies once spent millions of dollars retrofitting spaces to create rows of open desks, intimate conference rooms and elaborate communal gathering areas. Those designs are now problematic, executives say.
“All our agencies are open floor plans and that was a great idea in the past, but it now works against us,” says Harris Diamond, chief executive and chairman of advertising giant McCann Worldgroup.
Modifying offices to safely allow some workers to return is even more challenging than sending people home, and varying local guidelines complicate the picture.
Some places, like New York, mandate masks must be worn in public, while others, like Texas, have overruled city ordinances that require people to wear face coverings when they cannot socially distance. Infor, a New York-based business cloud software company with roughly 17,000 employees, plans to ask all employees to wear a mask while working and isn’t rushing to reopen its offices, even if state and local officials give clearance to return, a spokeswoman said.
At Discover Financial Services, facilities managers have looked at plans for each floor of every building. At the company’s headquarters in Riverwoods, Ill., near Chicago, Discover is leaning toward reseating employees at every other workstation.
“We’ll essentially put X’s on desks and chairs” not to be used, said Andy Eichfeld, Discover’s chief human-resources officer.
Some hallways and stairwells will become one-way, and many conference rooms will stay shut because they are too small to allow people to spread out. If the company opts to check the temperature of every arriving employee, as it does for the small number of workers still accessing its offices today, Mr. Eichfeld’s team is considering how to stagger arrival times to avoid people congregating in building lobbies, awaiting the test.
Co-working giant WeWork once prized density, making corridors narrow on purpose so that people were more likely to bump into each other and chat. It rented out access to its “hot desks”—large, shared tables with no assigned seating—at many of its more than 700 global locations for between $300 and more than $600 a month in New York City. To socially distance hot desks, half the chairs are being subtracted, and WeWork is removing 30,000 conference-room chairs around the world to keep people from congregating, said Hamid Hashemi, WeWork’s chief product and experience officer.
Cushman & Wakefield, a real-estate-services firm, is bringing a version of its “Six-Feet Office” concept launched in Amsterdam to offices in Los Angeles and New York City. The plan features plexiglass dividers between desks and circles on the floor to indicate how far apart workers should be.
McCann Worldgroup, one of Interpublic Group’slargest ad agencies, is considering assigning different letters to people in many of its U.S. offices, allowing each group to come into the office on different days of the week. Open-floor-plan layouts are under review.
McCann is changing its food offerings. In the youthful world of advertising, many agencies offer on-premise bars where co-workers can mingle. They are now a major concern.
McCann’s New York office will close its bar and cafeteria for the rest of 2020. Instead, the company has ordered dozens of microwaves and refrigerators so people can bring in their lunch. The appliances will go in enlarged kitchen areas being erected on every floor. Nobody will need an elevator to access food, and everyone will be expected to use the cleaning supplies stationed nearby to wipe down communal buttons and door handles.