Anxious about returning to an open office? Here’s what could change post-coronavirus
Open office floor plans were once hailed as the breeding grounds of collaboration and communication, but now people fear they will come down to nothing but a petri dish for the new coronavirus.
As states across the country ease lockdown restrictions, the workplace might have to be redesigned around potential risks of infection for the first time ever, experts say.
“Open office spaces are among the worst for COVID-19, particularly if they are sealed office spaces without open ventilation and the air is just recirculated within the building,” Dr. E Hanh Le, senior director of medical affairs at Healthline, said in a statement, according to Orion. “That’s because, like with other communicable airborne illnesses, COVID-19 is spread from coughing, sneezing, or talking as the virus travels through respiratory drops.”
In South Korea, one floor of an office drove a coronavirus outbreak, infecting 94 out of the 216 employees over the course of 16 days, a study by South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control said.
A national online survey questioned 1,014 U.S. adults and revealed that people are most afraid of returning to work solely because they have an open office, according to Orion.
About 53% of participants said open offices will lead to an “uptick of the coronavirus infection,” and 41% said their “open office will be a hotbed of infection,” the outlet said.
But will your office really transform when you come back and what will that look like?
How can your office physically change?
Offices could go back to the past and insert barriers in between desks again, former Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz told MarketWatch.
“I think office space is going to change, [and] we will go back to putting shields between people,” Bartz said. “We have to take the fear away from people.”
This time, the barriers could be clear, she said, so communication is not completely blocked off.
The cubicle-style could prevent virus droplets released from a cough across the room, but Donald Milton, an airborne disease expert at the University of Maryland, said he worries the barriers could instead keep a virus locked in, he told National Geographic.
This would put anyone who uses or touches the desk next at risk of infection, especially after one study showed the coronavirus can live on surfaces like plastic for up to three days, the paper in the New England Journal of Medicine said.
It’s not the floor plan, it’s you
What about the elevators, hallways and lunch rooms?
One expert believes it’s the company culture that might put an employee at increased risk of infection, not the floor plan.
“In general, there is probably a slightly increased risk from open offices,” Ben Waber, president of Humanyze, a Boston-based workplace analytics firm, said, according to Orion. “There are companies where there is just a chit-chat culture... The key thing is that it appears that really short interactions between people are likely responsible for the vast majority of disease spread at work.”
Waber worked with Harvard researchers on the transmission of diseases in the workplace, Orion reported. Their study found that in a simulation, if employees eliminated every interaction less than five minutes long, their chances of contracting an infection dropped by about 40% to 50%, “which is quite significant,” Waber said.
Employers could also space people out.
“If you’re doing that in combination with a reasonable amount of ventilation and sanitation, you should be able to have a reasonably safe space,” Milton told National Geographic.
Staggered arrival times, temperature checks and directions for foot traffic are other moves employers can take besides rearranging floor plans, the outlet said.
Uber is preparing to return their employees to work in their San Francisco office, but the company said they are only allowing 20% of staff in the building each day, the magazine reported.
Remote work
A complete makeover of office floor plans could be unaffordable for some companies, so employees may have to continue working from home until the pandemic subsides, which could take two years, according to new reports.
A study published mid-April revealed that up to 37% of U.S. jobs can be done at home, but less than a quarter of all full-time employees did so before the pandemic, University of Chicago researchers said.
“I think as many industries as possible will continue to work at home, and the companies will get better as to how to manage it,” Bartz told MarketWatch. “That’s good for a lot of reasons — it’s good for health, it’s good for people who have those obligations, like small children.”
This story was originally published May 1, 2020 at 3:06 PM with the headline "Anxious about returning to an open office? Here’s what could change post-coronavirus."
