Why not work from home? Are your employees not able to get their job done remotely?
The right thing to do from every perspective is close your office. If any of your employees is has a risk factor and dies of covid you will spend the rest of your life wondering if you could have prevented it - trust me I know.
I'm in the same position. More than a week ago I wrote an all-hands email to ensure that people realize that if they can work from home they should work from home and that we'd never force them to travel or be in the office if they do not want to and do not feel that it is in their best interest to do so. And of course it goes without saying that any indication of cold or flu like symptoms should cause someone to stay home.
As a co-founder/CEO of any company your first responsibility is for the health of your employees and those that depend on them. If you play games with that then you should not be in a leadership position to begin with.
Here is the full text of our email, feel free to C&P:
As you are no doubt aware there is a virus on the loose
and it isn't pretty.
The better ways to acquire it are to spend some time with
a bunch of total strangers in close confinement sharing
each others air. This includes all forms of public
transport.
These are exceptional (hopefully!) circumstances and I want to
make several things perfectly clear:
(1) You do not have to travel if you do not want to,
there is no obligation to participate in any of
the jobs in the next coming weeks/months and
not participating will *never* be held against
you in any form. You may opt to participate
remotely instead of on-site without financial
penalty.
(2) If you do travel, please take all precautions
possible to avoid getting ill, I'd really hate
myself if it turns out that we caused people to
fall ill (or worse) on account of the work we do,
your health comes first, always.
(3) There is a lot of misinformation going around,
some of it - unfortunately - spread by authorities
that really should know better. The current figures
are - to the best of my knowledge - 2-3% mortality
rate and an R0 (the rate at which the disease
spreads) of about 3. This makes this virus between
20 and 90 times more dangerous than the seasonal
flu, which has a .1% mortality rate and an R0 of
about 0.7-1.
(4) If you decide to participate but not in person
then we should enable video conferencing to do some
of the interviews, these should focus on the people
lower in the food chain at the companies we look at.
Please let us know your preference in time, talk to
Marco to ensure he is aware of what will happen so
that we can communicate it to the customers and the
targets alike.
(5) The virus outbreak is still in its early days, the
situation is *extremely* fluid, and you should make
an effort to stay informed and adapt your plans
immediately if you feel the situation warrants it.
Please do communicate any such changes.
Best regards, and please stay safe,
Remote work does not work for people who switch from office to home. It is not in their blood. Most office employees need constant management. If the employee can get away with watching netflix and do minimum from home, they will do it. I've observed many employees getting super slow or unreachable almost instantly after they start working from home. Most bosses don't like it and they get fired. In most cases nothing was related to covid in my opinion because obviously the employee performance dropped dramatically.
Work from home won't work for many companies. Period.
Business and money is one thing. Money comes and goes, for the most part. Employees, their health and relationship with your company are a whole different matter.
If you make everyone work from home, you'll end up with a temporary loss in productivity (thus money, which again comes and goes). Even if one of them does get infected anyway, they won't spread it to the rest of the team. The relationship with your employees is preserved because you're not forcing them to take risks.
If you force them to work in the office, it's just a matter of time before all of them get sick. The productivity will drop to zero, yet you'll still have to pay them sick leave and their opinion of your company will be tainted forever because you and your greed are the reason they are now all sick.
Not to mention, this is all assuming your employees are relatively young and have no pre-existing medical conditions that would make the infection life-threatening. Otherwise, we're not just talking about relationships but actual lives being put at risk.
I don't want to back to the office has nothing to do with covid. After all I never stop going to the gym, restaurant all these time, albeit secretly. Its that I prefer to work from home. My job doesn't require anything thing that can only be provided in the office anyway.
Someone I'm close to is an exec in the architecture and engineering industry and during covid told me that companies are going to go back to office because of the nightmare dealing with these kinds of issues.
He made the point that, what happens if your employee gets hurt working from home? It's a silly example but the employer could be liable for some reason since the employer could have failed to provide a "safe working environment".
Not sure if this actually could happen in reality, but an employer has to think about these possibilities and determine the risk (and mgmt overhead) of remote vs in person
I work for a small (~100 employees) electronics manufacturer. Most of our developers have been working from home since mid-March. We have been ordered to return to the physical office, despite an ongoing uptick in COVID19 cases in the area. Despite safety precautions, myself and many of my co-workers are concerned and uncomfortable with this. I'm curious if anyone else has experienced a similar situation, and if so - how did you handle it?
Yes, I think COVID times have shown us that it's not for everyone. I have colleagues who couldn't wait to get back into the office! Now that it can go either way, I would not want to force someone to work from home. So return the courtesy and don't force me to return to the office. Seems pretty simple.
Maybe people are just scared? There’s no ulterior motives needed about working in the office here. Omicron is scary. Also with something this spectacularly infectious it pays at the community level to work from home and slow the spread. Maybe consider the vulnerable in your community before you force your entire company to catch covid and then infect their grandparents.
Counter-datapoint: My employer (SAP) has had one case of COVID-19 among their German workforce. The entire office building has been closed down for disinfection and the employees there are asked to work from home for the quarantine period. All other employees (worldwide afaik) can work from home without informing their manager beforehand (as is the usual policy). All non-essential business travel is prohibited, with exceptions requiring high-tier management approval. Only two examples for exceptions were given: travelling to a data center to access physical hardware, and travelling to a customer site to access intranet services.
EDIT: I realize that this response is easier to do for SAP than for the average company since we are all working in front of computers anyway the entire time, with only 1-2% of tasks tied to physical objects (paper forms, server hardware etc.).
The virus will associate working from home with a disease pandemic. It already is killing the work from home culture. It's okay if the majority go to an office, the problems arise when the indifferent demonize working from home.
As someone who works for a global firm that has been back to the office since October I 100% agree.
We have a policy where you are free to work from home if you like given that there are no COVID cases in the city I live in however we have seen large influxes of staff returning to the office.
For me, its exactly the reasons you've called out.
At the end of the day there is no one size fits all for everyone, the same way that working in an office doesn't work for anyone. However I do believe that people should be given the option.
We ran a drill a couple of weeks back where everybody worked from home to ensure that if we have to close our office we are able to continue working (assuming we're not ill, of course). This was really just to shake out any issues.
Fortunately, since most of us already work remotely for at least some of the time we didn't have any significant issues.
The company I contact for has 450 people on site regularly. This week, the boss sent out one of those emails saying that you can work from home, but do not have to and that no one should judge others choices. He also made it widely known that he would be in the office, door open in case anyone needed to see him.
At our all hands meeting Friday, only he and the receptionist working several floors below him were still in the office.
Ordinarily we are a pretty gung-ho culture. People come to work sick. People take half days even doing chemo. People work 10 hour days because “product needs polish”. Yet no one is willing to take the risk of catching the virus, then bringing it home to our families.
Maybe if this was earlier in the crisis, it would be different but it is too late to not panic.
There is also the fact that people are been forced back into open offices as we speak.
There is no earthly reason I can't do my job from home (already have everything set-up from way before covid) but they want people back in the office...to have all meetings done at desk via videochat.
I pushed hard but they are not moving..which is why I will be as soon as I get a remote offer at comparable or better salary, started looking immediately after the last call where I got a hard no.
Government advice is "Should work from home if able to" but it's advice, not mandatory nor binding and there is no protection/law behind it - so pretty much nothing I can do other than quit, I've savings to get me through a year out of work but I don't want to deplete those in the middle of a pandemic when no one knows what the outcome of all this and a possible recurrence will be - so like a lot of people I'm having to balance the economic risk vs the real health risk about whether to go back or not.
My bosses bosses irrational hatred of WFH is going to put a lot of people at risk.
I run a team that went remote with the COVID restrictions and have not gone back to the office.
I observed:
- Working from home is _different_, but we still have the same work throughput
- Communication is slower, but more considered
- Personal boundaries on DnD time are more closely held
- Needless communication was reduced
I wouldn't go back to an open-plan office for anything. Even when we were in the office, most communication was on Slack because everyone had their sound cancelling headphones on trying to control the intrusiveness of the environment.
Until these managers mandating that WFH ends show some actual evidence of the benefits of being in the office, i'm going to assume this is a manager's ego not doing very well without overlooking their team.
I'm sure if your job is a bit ... needless ... it feels even worse when you work from home. In the meantime, some of us have work to do.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the CEO of our company was very adamant about working from home being a temporary situation, with all of the usual explanations.
Although I still have to go into the office occasionally to things that can't be done remotely, midway through the pandemic I had decided that I am going to work from home as much as I like from now on. And if this company doesn't let me, I'll switch jobs.
Earlier in this year, the CEO set a "back to the office" date of June 13th. I've been in occasionally since then and it's still basically a ghost town. So apparently most of my co-workers have the same idea as me.
Given that there is always some risk of infectious disease, and working from home would probably always reduce that risk, what is the risk level threshold above which it's appropriate to close an office?
I am in Romania. We have about 40 cases as of today country-wide. About a week ago we were all told to stay home at the slighest symptons or having travelled.
A big conference set to take place was cancelled already about two weeks ago and all business travel has been suspended for the last two weeks.
Yesterday we were all told to not come to the office unless absolutely necessary. So, we're all working from home until we hear otherwise.
Not a big deal for most of us. The local branch is relatively small (<100 people) and consists of mostly software engineers. We communicate daily with other branches around the world, so working remotely has never really been a problem.
Company also pays for private healthcare and we all received flu shots two months ago on company costs. Not that those help against COVID-19, but hey, it's something.
The right thing to do from every perspective is close your office. If any of your employees is has a risk factor and dies of covid you will spend the rest of your life wondering if you could have prevented it - trust me I know.
reply