Will we just work from home now? Expect less office space and more home offices

Heather Kampa is a commercial designer who’s worked from home for the past two months. Her focus these days is on adapting office environments – the old-fashioned kind – so they’ll feel safe when people return from shelter-in-place orders. Yet Kampa herself understands why many people have grown fond of working from home.

“I’m not commuting to work every day, I’m rolling out of bed,” said Kampa, a mother of two who typically commutes daily from Roseville to downtown Sacramento, where she is a corporate principal at one of the largest architectural firms in the region, HGA.

As guidelines to reopen work places are released and refined, employers are weighing what it will take to get back to business.

Whether it’s restaurants or retail, manufacturing or transportation, most industries will face significant modifications for months to come.

But some parts of work might change forever, especially if they involve offices.

Heightened concerns about worker safety and employer liability, coupled with a growing appreciation for the flexibility of working from home, are prompting workplaces large and small to consider keeping employees off-site.

California State University, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, announced Tuesday it will keep instruction online through the end of the year. Twitter announced this week that employees could work from home into perpetuity. Nationwide Insurance said it would permanently transition 4,000 employees to a work-from-home model, including 200 in Sacramento.

A mass shift to off-site work raises myriad questions: How will firms create cohesion and a sense of culture? What will become of office space that’s too plentiful? And is the blurred personal-professional line so many people have experienced over the last two months sustainable – or even desirable?

Brave New World of Work From Home

Working from home is hardly new. It’s just that COVID-19’s offered everyone who wasn’t already working from home a hurried introduction and crash course.

About two-thirds of employed Americans say they have worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic, a number that has doubled since mid-March, according to a Gallup panel survey.

The jobs now being performed off-site, at least some of the time, include music teachers and yoga instructors, doctors and veterinarians, building inspectors and sports coaches.

“We’ve been pushing the remote-work rock uphill about 15 years and now it feels like it’s chasing us down the other side,” said Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, a San Diego-based research firm that, with other organizations, recently published an analysis of work-from-home preferences based on a survey of 3,000 employees globally.

The number of employees who said they worked at home at least one day a week rose from 30 percent before COVID-19 to 80 percent doing so now, Lister said. About 77 percent want to keep doing so into the future, she said.

The popularity of teleworking has climbed steadily in the last decade. Until recently, resistance remained from skeptical employers fearing workers would be less productive.

To the contrary, Lister said, employees are often more productive, working over a longer number of hours in the home setting. This is for reasons including the elimination of commute times, fewer distractions and the intrinsic motivation of getting work out of the way so other parts of one’s life (child care, cooking dinner) can be attended to.

That blending of home and work life has advantages, experts say, but comes with unique challenges – especially when children are homeschooling.

‘Context Collapse’

While social media has been eroding the line between home and work for the last decade, the sudden onset of remote working has accelerated the merger.

“You learn a lot about someone when you look at how they set up their Zoom video – the background, what they choose to wear, what comes across their screen,” said Allison Joe, chief of staff to Sacramento Councilman Jay Schenirer. Joe has worked from her midtown home for the past two months because City Hall is closed. Her office is in her bedroom because it offers the convenience of a door.

“I’ll be trying to make my bed look as professional as possible, and then the cat walks in,” she said.

A bedroom also doubles as an office for Marco Martinez, information technology consultant at Sacramento State. After one too many video conferences featured his children, Martinez developed new protocols.

“We have a calendar that puts all the Zoom meetings in front of us so the kids remember: ‘Daddy is in a Zoom meeting,’” said Martinez, who lives in midtown with his wife, a UC Davis veterinarian, and their two children. “Otherwise, they walk into my bedroom, and that means they walk into my meeting.’ “

For Lauren Edvalson of Citrus Heights, working into the evening has offered separation between job and home.

“I’m getting my best work done overnight,” said Edvalson, a mother of three who owns a marketing firm which, since COVID-19, she runs from her kitchen table. “I think it’s made my clients more understanding because they see what I’m dealing with. I’m doing work for them, but I’m also a mom.”

Americans are increasingly experiencing what sociologists call “context collapse,” said Mary L. Gray, a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the author of Ghost Work, which examines remote workers and the gig economy.

“It’s a mingling of church and state, it’s how we manage the boundaries between work and home,” Gray said. “The good news is, this will hopefully be a moment of reconciling and empathy for people.”

Fuzzy Policies, Blurred Lines

While some people have enjoyed working from home because of the focus and privacy it offers, others have not.

People whose jobs hinge on brainstorming, or who thrive on serendipitous interactions, have been at a disadvantage. Leaders have difficulty reading their staff when it’s all over the computer. Those who lack technological support have struggled.

“The workplace often serves as an equalizer,” said Cristina Banks, a senior lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces. The large variance in work-from-home set-ups has “made the difference between the haves and have-nots more obvious.”

Looking ahead, companies will need remote-work policies for such issues as expected response times from staff and who pays for office equipment and high-speed internet, said Lister.

At the 1700-person California Air Resources Board offices in Sacramento, a survey was released this week to inform a new telework policy.

“If there’s a silver lining [to stay-at-home orders,] it’s that it has forced us to think about telework in a different way,” said Steve Cliff, a Deputy Executive Officer at CARB.

As for when his agency will welcome all employees back to offices, Cliff said no timeline is set: “Frankly, if we are able to work remotely, why go through all that right now?”

Returning to Work: Temperature-Taking and Liability

About 26 protocols guide how California offices are to be made safe for returning workers. They represent a logistical nightmare for property managers and employers.

Work schedules will be staggered to reduce the numbers of people on site. Incoming employees will screened for signs of coronavirus, perhaps including temperature-taking. Desks and chairs will be spread apart, while high-touch communal facilities will be cleaned between uses.

“It’s a risk management issue if it’s not cleaned correctly,” said Haven Fry, Business Development Manager of JM Environmental Inc, which scoured all 480,000 square feet of the California State Capitol. It took about 50 workers a week to do the cleaning, Fry said.

Companies with spread-out floor plans might have an easier time adjusting, compared to call centers with condensed cubicles, or companies with open floor plans.

“We know that 12 months from now, when we are not so afraid of each other anymore, a lot of people are going to want to go back to more collaborative spaces, with chairs and lounge furniture,” said HGA’s Kampa, whose firm has issued coronavirus adaptation guidelines, Redefining the Workplace.

Returning to work places will be guided by liability, as well.

In a significant reversal of the way workers compensation typically works, Gov. Newsom on May 6 signed an executive order that, in essence, says a worker who contracts COVID-19 presumably did so on the job. The rule is retroactive to March 19 and goes through July 5.

Importantly, the presumption that an employee contracted the virus at work does not apply if the employee worked from home. As such, it serves as a strong incentive for employers to keep their workers out of the office, said Jennifer Madden, an employment lawyer at Delfino Madden.

“I think it will encourage more people to work from home,” said Madden. One of her clients has already decided to permanently keep 75 percent of its legal department working from home, she said.

What about the office space?

Those who watch Sacramento’s commercial real estate industry say it’s too soon to tell what the long-term impact of COVID-19 will be on the region’s 44 million square feet of office space.

Ali Nadimi, managing director Newmark Knight Frank, said some downsizing might occur.

“I think we will need less brick and mortar, but it doesn’t go away entirely,” said Nadimi, adding that predictions about the demise of office space during the Great Recession proved to be wrong.

“You’re still going to need physical space because we still need places to go,” Nadimi said.

Alexis Garrett, Senior Vice President at JLL, agreed that in-person spaces are a must.

“What we’ve all learned in this experiment is that most of us can work from home at least for some aspects of our jobs,” said Garrett, who specializes in commercial office space. “You can save time commuting, help your kids and be more present. But you still need the office.

“The all-important secret sauce companies want is culture,” Garrett added. “You can’t create culture with Zoom calls.”

This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 4:00 AM with the headline "Will we just work from home now? Expect less office space and more home offices."