US office workers are working from home, trading conference rooms for Zoom, and replacing morning commutes with mid-day walks.
The novel coronavirus — and the social distancing that's being implemented to prevent its spread — has been a huge test for businesses' workplace continuity and remote work plans.
It could also fast-forward businesses' plans to do more work remotely and to find tech solutions to make working from home as productive as working in the office, according to real-estate services giant JLL.
On Thursday, Sundar Nagarajan, JLL Americas head of consulting, and Peter Miscovich, JLL's managing director of strategy and innovation, held a webinar on the topic of workplace continuity and remote work. They characterized this current situation as a unique challenge for businesses, and one that could lead to unintended, lasting changes.
"There is a greater opportunity for a paradigm shift to happen," Nagarajan said.
Workplace continuity decisions
Three factors make this crisis unlike any other, even compared to era-defining moments like 9/11: the disease has no geographical center, so there's no way to move operations away from it; it is transmitted between people, so work has to be done remotely; and it is not a singular event, but instead a pandemic that could last 18 months.
As a result, workplace continuity plans need to be able to run for much longer than they may have been previously designed to.
"It's fine if we have to do this for a week, it's fine if we have to do this for two weeks maybe, but what are the long-term implications, and how do you keep the employee engaged, involved, and productive?" Nagarajan said.
In the webinar, Nagarajan and Miscovich laid out the timing and impact of workplace continuity decisions into four quadrants, labeled by two variables: short term versus long term, and business impact versus employee/work process impact.
Short-term WFH challenges
The most important short-term decision is the health, well-being, and purpose of employees — and especially the leaders who will make workplace continuity decisions, Nagarajan said. This can range from the decision to close offices to slow the spread of the coronavirus to finding ways to accommodate working parents who can no longer rely on school or daycare to watch their children.
Employee and executive's health determines the success of a company's remote-work technological infrastructure, its communication to employees, vendors, and clients about the crisis, and the business processes that need to change to meet this prolonged workplace continuity challenge.
As workplace continuity plans are developed with a longer horizon in mind, businesses are beginning to lay the groundwork for the "paradigm shift" that Nagarajan mentioned.
On the employee side, firms need to find ways to maintain, or even improve, its employee culture and morale remotely. Both Nagarajan and Miscovich noted that 9/11 actually solidified and strengthened some bonds between employees, but the remote nature of this crisis presents new challenges.
Firms also need to plan for the physical health of their employees. Office workplaces are covered by OSHA regulations, which sets standards that employers must use to protect their employees from hazards, but the couches and kitchen tables where employees are dialing into meetings present different ergonomic challenges.
An 'ecosystem' approach
Miscovich advocated for an "ecosystem" approach to real-estate continuity that provides a range of work options: working from home, replacing city-center offices with more distributed coworking and satellite centers, and using non-traditional workplaces like hotels and conference centers.
While social distancing measures only allow working from home at this moment, Miscovich referenced research that the pandemic may come in "waves over time," which would lend itself to a workplace continuity plan that sits between the traditional office and a totally work from home environment.
If transmission of the virus slows but does not stop, businesses could find a middle ground between full density and remote work by clustering employees in different, geographically scattered locations.
The longer-term response is also fertile ground for the development and adoption of technology. Video-conferencing company Zoom has seen its stock climb as meetings, and even happy hours and team lunches, are conducted remotely. More novel technology, such as virtual and augmented reality, may see a similar boost as social distancing continues. Miscovich said that we may even see "ways of working we haven't imagined today."
This workplace paradigm shift is beginning to become apparent already: data and analytics giant Refinitiv's CRO told Business Insider that the firm may continue to meet with clients digitally and encourage work from home after the crisis has passed.
"We've all been put in this accelerated timeline over the last three-four weeks, where we're looking at distributed work and remote work in a very accelerated manner" Miscovich said.
