As people continue to venture from their homes and get vaccinated, companies are eyeing when and how to return to the office. Some are planning to return in the coming months.
Many considerations go into a return to in-office work, the foremost being vaccinations. All adults became eligible to receive vaccines across the country in late April, but some additional calculus comes into play. For example, each vaccine has a different amount of time that it takes to become fully effective.
Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine becomes most effective two weeks after it gets administered. In comparison, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses and three to four weeks between each shot, meaning that with the additional two weeks after the second dose, it takes closer to a month and a half to be fully protected. Companies will have to include those timetables in their office-reopening calculus and consider employees who might want to wait until their children are vaccinated, which has just started ramping up.
There are also considerations about what in-office work will look like post-COVID-19. Will masks still be required now that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has decreed inoculated people need not wear them indoors? How about social distancing? Summer Johnson McGee, dean of the University of New Haven’s School of Health Sciences, said that returning to the office in the coming months will be “quite messy and confusing” for employers and workers.
“Given that the CDC is allowing fully vaccinated individuals not to wear masks indoors, businesses are going to have to develop their own policies for employees around face-covering usage,” she told the Washington Examiner. “Ensuring compliance with corporate policies on face-covering usage will require employees to share vaccination status with their employer.”
McGee also said communication will be a key component about returning to work. She said companies will need to discuss the safety protocols they put in place and work to dispel the anxiety and fear among some employees about getting back into the office.
McGee’s colleague Brian Marks, executive director of the university’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program, told the Washington Examiner that he’s had several companies reach out to him recently for guidance about returning to the office. He said he has seen growing interest among executives to get employees back into the office sooner rather than later, although in many cases, doing so won’t involve everyone coming back at once.
He said he thinks corporate America will essentially see employees returning to their desk jobs, at least in the near term, in a hybrid work model in which employees return on a limited basis or for a few days per week while other employees might return fully. He said differences could come down to what role that person plays in the company and how easy that role is to do remotely versus in the office.
Marks illustrated his point by highlighting the software technology sector. The economist said that from what he has seen, generally speaking, the younger software engineers who are just starting their careers are looking to socialize with their peers and learn from the mentorship of other professionals in the industry.
“There will be a drive to have these individuals get back in the office to foster collaboration as well as loyalty,” Marks said. He noted that the more senior employees who might not have day-to-day front-facing activities with others might not be pushed to come back into the office five days per week because there is a recognition that the nature of their work doesn’t require doing so right away. “They can be equally as productive and still remain remote.”
Marks said that while those two examples exist on opposite ends of the spectrum, companies will have to figure out what to do with employees that fall somewhere in between. For many companies, that will be a hybrid model.
Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, has been tracking trends about returning to work for the past year. He and other researchers have found that the hybrid model will likely reign supreme as companies begin to return to in-office work. They found that, on average, employees will probably have three days working in the office and two days working from home per week when offices begin opening up.
The return to in-office work will also be a significant change for those hired during the pandemic and who have never even worked inside the company’s office space despite working for months and meeting with colleagues daily on Zoom.
Collin Zucker, a business analyst for a meal-kit company, interviewed for his job at the company’s office in New York before moving to remote work but has never worked with others inside the building because of the pandemic.
“In some ways, that was like a little bit of a tease,” he told the Washington Examiner, noting that he did get to interact with some of his co-workers during the interview process before starting work remotely.
Zucker said that while he thinks he has been able to do his work well remotely, he misses the social aspect of getting to know co-workers on an in-person basis. And while he is a little nervous about getting back into the groove of working with others in an office after so much time, he is more excited than anxious about returning.
He said the aspects he is most excited about regarding a return are:
- The overall social aspect.
- The ability to collaborate on projects easily.
- Getting to know colleagues personally.
Zucker said the drawback of returning would be reestablishing a morning routine and commuting to the office.
There are also questions about what office work will entail. The CDC recently issued guidance that permits fully vaccinated people to take off their masks indoors and outdoors. Paul Wolfe, the senior vice president of human resources at Indeed, told the Washington Examiner that the new guidance was met with surprise by human resources leaders.
Wolfe said that from what he can gather, “folks are to a point now that they want to go back to the office for the most part.” The human resources chief said that while recent enthusiasm among business leaders to get back into the office hasn’t been across the board, there have been some companies that decided to speed things up in an attempt to get back into the office more quickly.
Doug Badger, a senior domestic policy studies fellow at the Heritage Foundation, pointed out that despite the new guidance for vaccinated people and masks, the CDC hasn’t updated guidance specific to offices, which he characterizes as “confusing and complex,” since early April.
“The CDC hasn’t clarified how these guidelines intersect with their recent pronouncement that vaccinated people needn’t wear masks in indoor spaces they share with other vaccinated people,” he told the Washington Examiner in a written response to questions. “This discordance will create confusion, with some workers (including those who haven’t been immunized) objecting to mask-wearing and others who may be fearful of working in closed settings.”
While some companies including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase plan to have workers in the office this summer, others are taking a more cautious approach.
Bloom, the Stanford economist, told the Washington Examiner that most firms he has spoken to are planning to begin in-person work after Labor Day or sometime in the fall.
“There are some companies, like Wall Street banks and property companies, calling office workers back earlier, but they are the outliers. Many other firms are indeed looking at 2022 as the full return date,” he said.
