As Central Kentucky begins to re-open, many businesses are determining how to make their workplaces safe spaces for employees to come back to.
New protocols announced as part of Gov. Andy Beshear’s Healthy at Work initiative include holding meeting over the phone or video conference whenever possible, ensuring the office is at 50 percent capacity at any given time and maintaining social-distancing guidelines whenever possible.
Designers say there are steps businesses can take, even inexpensive ones, that can help them meet the state’s requirements and open safely.
Continue to work from home
Do we bring people back into the office, or do we continue to let people work from home? That’s a primary question, says Tonie Webb, principal designer at Dovetail Design Studio in Lexington.
“A lot of people that I know are actually still having their employees work from home,” Webb said. “But I feel like the conversation is changing to ‘Okay, when do we bring these people back, how do we do that, logistically?’”
But working from home also has its challenges, said Kyle Doezma, president of Office Resources, Inc. (ORI) in Lexington.
“A lot of the organizations are saying that working from home is going pretty well, so we’re no real rush to bring everybody back. But when you think of an employer’s ability to create great workspaces for the people in the office, they have little control over what environment their employees are working in from home,” Doezma said. He notes that only about 29 percent of employees who are working at home have an ergonomic chair, for example, “which arguably is one of the most important pieces of equipment when you’re seated and focused and working for a long period of time.”
In May, Google told its employees to plan on working from home for the rest of the year. As part of that agreement, the company provided its employees with $1,000 to purchase home office equipment. Doezema said some of ORI’s clients have similarly worked with employees to buy equipment or to split the purchase of home office equipment with employees or, in some cases, to help employees purchase equipment and then take a percentage out of their paychecks to reimburse the company.
Moving desks and installing walls
Providing adequate space to keep employees a minimum of six feet from one another is key for safety in the COVID-19 era, designers say.
“Most people don’t have the luxury of adding square footage to spread people out. There’s a reason why all the people are that close together [in office settings],” Webb said. “Right now, it’s more been about leaving the desks where they are and seating people at every other desk.”
Some clients have even converted conference room space into office space for multiple employees, she said. Other solutions for social distancing include split shifts and floor stickers.
“I know some offices are splitting shifts, where half the office comes in half the week and the other half comes in the second half of the week,” Webb said. “Companies like Lynn Imaging are designing and printing floor stickers so that people are more aware of social distancing and what six feet really looks like.”
Doezema said sometimes it’s a matter of rethinking the office layout to provide more room for space between desks.
Social distancing also means closing down or limiting access to areas where people gather in offices. Water coolers, breakrooms, office kitchens — in many offices those common areas are being limited, or eliminated altogether, the designers say.
Many workplaces are taking the return to the office slowly. For example, Dan Smaldone, director of communications for Kentucky Farm Bureau, said the company will be taking its time in bringing people back into the workplace. As most of their 700 employees continue to work from home, some will return to their office sites the first week of July.
Initially, those with private offices will return to work, followed some time later by about 10 to 15 percent of the remaining staff, he said. In order to accommodate social distancing, desks will be rearranged or moved, and some hallways and stairways will become one-way only. Break rooms, he said, will have some furniture removed to prevent people from congregating, and conference rooms won’t be used, as meetings will continue to be held online.
But eventually, he says, there will be a return to the buildings where work happens.
“Our buildings are an investment on our part and we want our people to come there to work,” he said. “But how they will look in the new world post-Covid is still to be seen.”
Divided but together
Open-office arrangements, a popular concept over the past decade, are likely to remain, the designers say, although physical barriers between desks will be a common feature.
Caitlin Neal, director of sales with ORI, says installing dividers of any number of materials can help offices increase safety, with minimal cost and inconvenience.
“I think the biggest considerations are ‘how you bring people back?’ and ‘how do you alleviate the fear around people coming back and actually bring them back safely?’” Neal said. “People need to feel safe. They need to legitimately be able to say they feel safe. And you can get a variety of different screens of different types from $100 to several hundreds of dollars per screen, depending on the material.”
“People need to feel safe. They need to legitimately be able to say they feel safe. And you can get a variety of different screens of different types from $100 to several hundreds of dollars per screen, depending on the material.” — Caitlin Neal, ORI director of sales
Webb says different vendors provide different divider materials — from plexiglass to corrugated cardboard.
“Believe it or not, corrugated cardboard is one of the more popular ones right now,” she said. “They’re finished on the outside, so they look really nice, but it’s an inexpensive way to put dividers between people’s workspaces… At the beginning of this, we were all really worried about cardboard and leaving our packages on the porch, but there are new studies that have shown that the virus starts to decay after about 24 hours on cardboard, so it’s actually proving to be a healthy way to divide those spaces.”
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Webb says one company, Enwork, can set up a U-shaped divider to go around desk for about $50 for a 48-inch wide desk.
Both designers recommend offices remain flexible now though. Information about COVID-19 is changing rapidly, as are processes and requirements, they say.
“One of the things we’ve advocated to our clients is not to have too big of a knee-jerk reaction to changing space right now, but to see how this plays out,” Doezema said, knowing that social distancing and enhanced sanitation protocols are likely to remain with us for some time.