As COVID-19 infections surge in parts of the U.S., many workplaces remain empty or are operating with skeleton crews.
Most agree that the decision to return to the office should involve a combination of business, government and medical officials and scientists who have a deep understanding of COVID-19 and infectious disease in general. The exact timing will depend on many factors, including the government’s willingness to open up, the experts’ view of current conditions, business leadership’s tolerance for risk (or how reasonable it is to run the business remotely), where your business happens to be and the current conditions there.
That doesn’t mean every business that can open will, but if and when they get a green light, they can at least begin bringing some percentage of employees back. But what that could look like is clouded in great uncertainty around commutes, office population density and distancing, the use of elevators, how much you can reasonably deep clean, what it could mean to have a mask on for eight hours a day, and many other factors.
To get a sense of how tech companies are looking at this, we spoke to a number of executives to get their perspective. Most couldn’t see returning to the office beyond a small percentage of employees this year. But to get a more complete picture, we also spoke to a physician specializing in infectious diseases and a government official to get their perspectives on the matter.
While there are some guidelines out there to help companies, most of the executives we spoke to found that while they missed in-person interactions, they were happy to take things slow and were more worried about putting staff at risk than being in a hurry to return to normal operations.
Iman Abuzeid, CEO and co-founder at Incredible Health, a startup that helps hospitals find and hire nurses, said her company was half-remote even before COVID-19 hit, but since then, the team is now completely remote. Whenever San Francisco’s mayor gives the go-ahead, she says she will reopen the office, but the company’s 30 employees will have the option to keep working remotely.
She points out that for some employees, working at home has proven very challenging. “I do want to highlight two groups that are pretty important that need to be highlighted in this narrative. First, we have employees with very young kids, and the schools are closed so working at home forever or even for the rest of this year is not really an option, and then the second group is employees who are in smaller apartments, and they’ve got roommates and it’s not comfortable to work at home,” Abuzeid explained.
Those folks will need to go to the office whenever that’s allowed, she said. For Lindsay Grenawalt, chief people officer at Cockroach Labs, an 80-person database startup in NYC, said there has to be a highly compelling reason to bring people back to the office at this point.
Government officials in Belarus announced they had arrested an individual on charges of having helped to distribute GandCrab ransomware. On July 30, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) of the Republic of Belarus revealed that it had arrested a 31-year-old resident of Gomel in cooperation with the United Kingdom and Romania. An investigation into the […]… Read More
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Tripwire’s July 2020 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft, F5 Networks, Cisco, and Oracle. Up first on the patch priority list this month are patches for F5 Networks and Cisco for vulnerabilities that have been integrated into various Exploits. Metasploit has recently added exploits for F5 Networks’ BIG-IP (CVE-2020-5902) and Cisco […]… Read More
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This blog post is based on the third episode — Preparing for the Unpredictable — of a three-part webinar series, which can be viewed in full here. I was joined by a panel of industry experts including Dave Millner…
I am delighted to announce that international energy services company Centrica plc is the inaugural winner of the Citrix Fujitsu Connected Society Award.
We created this annual award with Fujitsu, our Worldwide Partner of the Year for 2020, …
It's looking much less likely the U.S. will experience a sharp, V-shaped recovery. Instead, a growing amount of data is indicating a slower, "swoosh" shaped recovery is likely.
The swoosh refers to the shape of Nike's logo and indicates a recession that starts with a steep decline and is followed by a gradual recovery.
According to the Wall Street Journal's Economic Forecasting Survey, 70% of economists think the recovery will be swoosh shaped.
The reason is the continued outbreaks of COVID-19, which is leading to less economic activity.
The Opportunity Insights chart below (click to enlarge) shows an estimate of the percent change of total U.S. consumer spending.
You can easily recognize the famous Nike swoosh in the chart.
You can also easily see that consumer spending stalled in mid-June and is running at about 6.4% below pre-COVID levels. While much better than earlier this year, this is in a range that indicates we're still in a deep recession.
Other data also supports a swoosh shaped recovery.
The chart below is from Oxford Economic's U.S. recovery tracker. The tracker looks at 6 economic sectors to develop an overall economic score.
It again illustrates the swoosh. But more ominously it also shows the U.S. economy has declined a bit over the past month. Key quote:
"The foundations to this recovery are cracking under the weight of a mismanaged health crisis. Our Recovery Tracker fell for the third time in five weeks in the week ended July 10. The health index declined for the fourth consecutive week; demand fell for the second consecutive week, its largest decline in four months; and employment was unchanged."
Other data also points to a slower recovery, especially unemployment claims which have averaged well over 1 million a week over the past 4 weeks and rose last week over the prior couple of weeks.
The resurgence of COVID-19 likely means a full economy recovery won't happen until a vaccine is available and - and this is a big and - widely distributed. This combination will likely not happen until at least Q2 of next year, and it could easily take longer.
We, of course, hope the economy recovers quickly. But businesses of all kinds need to be prepared for the recession lasting well into next year.
Ships are increasingly using systems that rely on digitalization, integration, and automation, which call for cyber risk management on board. As technology continues to develop, the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) onboard ships and their connection to the Internet creates an increased attack surface that needs to be addressed. Challenges in […]… Read More
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