Don’t Return to the Office Until You Read This
An eight-point plan for reopening.
You have a lot to think about at the moment if you run a company. One of the biggest questions is whether to have employees return to the office, assuming your area allows it. How do you let people do their jobs and keep them safe? We asked scientists, interior designers, public-health and building experts, and others for their thoughts on what to do right now—and what to think about for the future.
“You should be identifying the core workers that you need to be physically present,” says Joseph Allen, assistant professor of exposure assessment science at the Harvard School of Public Health. Everyone else stays home. He says companies should follow the decades-old approach to keeping workers safe from chemical and biological hazards called the hierarchy of controls. Step 1 is “elimination”—which in the case of Covid-19 reopenings means prohibiting anyone from a building who doesn’t need to be there.