CH. 01: An Introduction to Changing How We Work

AIHA

The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) has built a terrific site www.backtoworksafely.org that provides very detailed guidance on how to redesign the workplace, in terms of methods, process and infrastructure.

Their detailed plans and guidelines focus on

At Home service providers
Construction
General office Setting
Gyms and Workout Facilities
Hair and nail Salons
Retail
Restaurants
Tax’s, limos, and rideshare

Beyond the above, the AIHA web site offers a very wide range of information about how to navigate through a working world of COVID-19

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Introduction to Working safely

Will people return to work in a risk-free environment, or will workers face material risks in the workplace during the first COVID-19 cycle?

It is difficult to imagine a risk-free option. The longer the government keeps the economy closed the deeper will be the economic destruction. The people who will be most crushed by this are those most dependent on the economy for a regular check, and that’s the vast majority of people who work. I think that we would be living in a fantasy world if we believe that the government has the resources to pay these checks for six months to a year. However, leaders with more power and authority than I will need to calculate these risks and make a judgment about when to open up the economy, and how to open it up.

Can We Mitigate These Risks?

The purpose here is to build a living breathing compendium of ideas about how to change how we work and rearchitect how jobs are positioned within a business to become consistent with global COVID-19 risk mitigation guidelines: social distancing, exceptional hygiene, and an uncompromising principle that you do not enter a physical workplace, or you leave immediately, if you have the slightest sense that you are not well.

Obviously, we need to stay on alert as the health authorities iterate through these guidelines because our thinking is based, first and foremost, on conformance to their thinking.

Changing The Work Paradigm

Our collective purpose is to imagine as many ideas as we can about how the work paradigm could be changed – slightly, materially, or fundamentally. We want to identify very specific job functions in a wide array of jobs, covering a wide spectrum of industries, and imagine how that job, that critical process could be conducted consistent with the CDC guidelines.

Pick your industry: product manufacturing, software development, customer service, light manufacturing, consumer banking, entertainment, transportation, public transit, food services, finance and investing, legal, medicine – everything else we do.

Pick where the work is performed: big companies, small businesses, independent contractors, academia, public service, schools, and more. Then we must imagine our jobs, or jobs we know about, or critical processes in our work and develop a compendium of examples of how jobs, functions and processes could be altered, adjusted, or redesigned.

Our purpose herein is to document a compendium of ideas and act as a catalyst for those returning to the front lines. Maybe we can give these people a head start, given that they will be facing a much wider set of business burdens.

This Is The First Version Of This Compendium Of Ideas.

Where do we start? We start with what we have learned during the past month. People are redesigning how work is done on the fly. In other cases, people are doing real process re-engineering by re-examining work processes and trying to figure out how you could do the work without locational dependency. Listed below is a first attempt to start cataloguing ideas.

Change the spatial dynamics in the work environment. No one sits closer than ten feet from another. Expand the space. Yes, it will cost, but not as much as being shut down.
Change the social dynamic. No physical touching. No congregating. Do your cheerleading on-line. Meet on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or whatever. Or similar platforms.
As Tom Friedman stated in a recent NY Times column, perhaps no one goes back to work before a 14-day self-quarantine. Many of us are already in the middle of that. Give or take the time, the idea is that no infected person enters the work environment. (Tom’s column, “A Plan to get America back to work”. Required reading.)
Businesses need to put maximum pressure on the government to provide universal testing of anyone re-entering the work environment. This will mitigate a great deal of risk. Whereas a month ago there was not even a consensus about how to test, we now have simple tests that can be self-administered inside a medical facility of some kind which will provide results inside of fifteen minutes. We can mass produce what we need to do these tests and we have the processing equipment which does the analysis. (See companion essay on the Bill Gates’s TED talk for more details.)
Because we are ordering people to stay away from work, or leave, if they have any sense of illness, or until tested, we need to provide government funded paid sick leave, at least until we get through the COVID-19 first cycle. This is not a political issue. It’s a necessity to get people back to work consistent with the guidelines and it would be temporary. The politicians can work out long term solutions after we have survived cycle one of COVID-19.
Continue social distancing in everyone’s private lives.
Experiment with new rules for flying on an airplane. We spend billions now examining people for weapons and explosives. Maybe now we need to take your temperature, or inspect you for any symptoms, or put you through a test which will add fifteen minutes to your travel time.
If a traveler passes a screening test to fly, Airlines are forced to keep middle seats unoccupied during these six months to a year period, unless occupied by a person from your same household. Hey, it is better than not flying at all.
New spatial rules for all forms of transportation.
If you want to ride on a subway you need to be tested every week and display a card. This wouldn’t eliminate sick people, but it surely would mitigate the risk.
Issue a daily ration of facemasks to all workers as soon as we have met the capacity needs of our health care system. Expand use where it makes sense.
No bulk standing in line anywhere. Figure it out. 6-10 feet. We need to change social habits. Not only do we need to que up, we need to do so with space. And we need to quickly make it socially unacceptable not to conform.
Spatial rules need to be followed in every commercial establishment: restaurants, theatres, movie houses. In short, available capacity in all such places will be cut in half. 50% may be better than zero. With practice and better information, we may quickly get to 85%. It may be a long slug after that. In time, venues may need to become much larger. Figure it out.

Everything can’t be figured out. There will be some net losses. But there will also be net increases.

The above comments are illustrative. We are going to throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. A lot won’t.

Your job is to come forth with your ideas. Let’s get to work.

FOLLOWING IS A SET OF YOUR IDEAS FOR REDESIGNING HOW WE WORK

GENERAL IDEAS

This virus will be fought in three phases: mitigation (social distancing), therapeutics, and vaccination. We are in the first phase now. While this phase may eventually end, in months or longer, it could produce some profound changes in how we live our lives. Will social distancing simply disappear, along with the memories, or might it become, to some degree, a cultural norm? Will a fear of contact/social intimacy quickly dissipate or might it persist even after the virus has been defeated with a vaccine? Might this cause many industries to think twice about how they operate and even how they are organized?

How might a restaurant which requires tables to be close together and turned over frequently accommodate social distancing?

How might a gymnasium or a fitness center which requires multiple use of the same equipment accommodate social distancing?

How might a sports arena which requires close contact to fill the seats accommodate social distancing?

The “hotel office space” concept might be accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. Why is it necessary for all members of a team to be in the office at the same time when they could work at home with equal, if not improved, efficiency. For example, how much time in the office is spent in social interaction? Face to face technology platforms now allow a degree of social intimacy. Until now, the face to face meeting has pushed back on face to face technology. But now people are going to push face to face technology into a role which might not even have been imagined only three months ago.

Many universities and colleges have on-line classes. But very few have pushed on-line to an equal level with degrees obtained predominantly on campus. Now, virtually all universities and colleges have been forced to complete the 2020 school year on-line, or not at all. What will be learned? Will remote education take on equal status? Will geographical proximity be less important? Will most degree programs be built on a combination of in-class and on-line? Will people start imagining the content improvement that could be built into on-line education? Could we see a paradigm shift?