Complicated returns: There’s nothing simple about heading back to the workplace  

By Marco Buscaglia
Published in the Chicago Tribune, November 15, 2020

While the request for employees to return to work may have been slowed by the increasing cases of COVID-19, there will likely come a day when employees are asked to return to the workplace, perhaps soon than later. And many employees aren’t too happy about it. 

“I’m not going back until there’s a vaccine, period,” says an administrative employee of a Chicago-based university who didn’t want her name used. “My job can be done from my apartment, from my car, from wherever, and I’m not putting myself at risk to make my boss feel better about herself because she can see her team laid out in front of her.”

Given that all safety precautions are met, our particularly agitated employee says she will have no problem returning to the office. “I am out of my mind working alone every day,” she says. “Zooming with co-workers is fine but I miss the [heck] out of my friends at the office.”

Checked off

Greg Hayes, CEO and co-founder of Branch, an office-furniture start-up in New York, says it seems the main prerequisite for a company deciding it’s time to go back to the office has been geography. As of recently, Hayes says the bulk of Branch’s leases and furniture contracts have come from companies in the South and Midwest. As far as the coasts, Hayes says most companies there are offering employees to work from the office or from home. “On the coasts, companies who have opened their offices again are almost always employing a hybrid approach, in which employees are only in the office a couple of days per week,” Hayes says. Additionally, Hayes says he’s noticed that the type of work a company does also has an impact. “Technology companies are almost all staying home but more traditional businesses in the legal and professional services industries have been far more likely to send employees back to the office,” he says.

In many cases, simple economics can influence the decision on whether or not employees should return to work. “Many companies were anticipating a September return to the office but that’s has been pushed to January. Realistically, we think it will be March before most businesses return and even then, most will likely take a hybrid approach to repopulating the office,” he says. “Management at the companies who are returning to the office now might be thinking ‘we're paying for this expensive lease, we may as well use it.’ They also might have seen a decrease in productivity with employees working from home.”

On shaky ground

Grant Aldrich, CEO of OnlineDegree.com, knows people are reluctant to go back to the office, which means they should demand transparency from their employers before and after returning to work. “Though some employers want to keep this information confidential, it makes everyone less safe,” says Aldrich. “If employees are required to return to the workplace, they can also request a certain level of safety, precaution, and sound policy. The company should have to write its COVID safety plan and an action plan if people start returning.”

If a plan isn’t in place, employees should negotiate to continue working from home, especially if they live with elderly relatives or young children. “[Certain employees] may they may have a reasonable claim on continuing to work from home,” Aldrich says. “Additionally, you can cite emotional reasons such as stress or anxiety to back the need to stay home. Employers must accommodate the mental health of their employees.”

Finally, if you believe there’s a real danger in returning to work, you can brush up on your legal rights and refuse to go back. “If the employer then fires you, you can claim that it was an unfair dismissal,” says Aldrich. “If you can argue that there is clear and imminent danger, it’s worth asking your employer for a compromise. This might mean unpaid leave, different shifts or other arrangements that can help you feel safer.”

Stay or go

Not everyone’s on board with returning to the office, either now—or in some cases—ever. “We’ve always been a remote company. It would be like me convincing my CEO to get office space so we can have more overhead,” says Mike Zima, Chief Growth Officer of Zima Media, an e-commerce digital marketing agency in Chicago. “There’s a lot of value to create a better working environment for employees because it increases the life in the work-life balance scale. Imagine the one or two hours you’re commuting five times a week. We see a high motivation to work when trust and accountability are there.”

Zima says companies that insist their employees return to work may want to look at how they manage—and value—their employees in the first place. “Many companies will struggle because their culture was never good, and they look at their employees are producers and not internal stakeholders,” he says. “Motivate your stakeholders and watch your culture appreciate it. Employees will crave working for employers that can meet their needs and care about their employees and well-being.”

Still, there are many companies that have set new back-to-work protocols based on requests from employees. Ian Kelly, vice president of operations at NuLeaf Naturals, a hemp CBD oil company in Denver, Colorado, says his team was working remotly from March until June but made the decision to return to work based on feedback from NuLeaf Naturals workers. “It is difficult to know what to do so we had to be practical and realistic,” Kelly says. “At a point in the pandemic where we were able to go to grocery stores or shopping malls, it began to feel like staying away from an office bubble wasn’t a necessity. Employees were experiencing stress and burnout from the difficulties of work/life balance while remote, and we had major projects that were suffering due to the inability to do as much collaboration in person so it was weighing whether remote work was causing more problems than it was solving, and based on employee feedback that was the case.”

Kelly says after adapting extensive new cleaning protocols at the office and creating policies that allowed employees to work from home if they chose to, NuLeaf Naturals re-opened its workspace. But he says he knows their approach may not work for every workplace. “I understand that some employers are forcing people to come back when they don't feel safe and that’s not something I agree with,” he says. “I think it is in the best interest of any business to take employee feedback and concerns seriously and this has been the outcome for us. So far the return has been successful and the abundance of caution is paying off.”