Back to Work Survey Results: What's Next For the Future of Workplaces

Last month, we surveyed different industry leaders about how they planned on reopening their workplaces, their top priorities in the process, and what they anticipated moving forward.

We wanted to share our findings from the survey, and provide more insight into what’s next for the future of workplaces.

Overall, from our respondents we see these key trends:

• Most are not returning to work until 2021.
• Safety and health of employees is of the utmost importance to employers in this time.
• When offices are reopening, most will not be operating at full capacity with employers split 50-50 on whether or not WFH indefinitely will be a policy. When we go into industry specific data—some interesting stats crop up;
• 100 percent of government respondents will be WFH indefinitely
• 100 percent of finance respondents will be WFH indefinitely
• 75 percent of nonprofit respondents will be WFH indefinitely
• 50 percent of respondents in the manufacturing industry will be WFH indefinitely
• 50 percent of respondents in the food and beverage industry will be WFH indefinitely
• 50 percent of respondents in the entertainment industry will be WFH indefinitely
• 29 percent of respondents in the tech industry will be WFH indefinitely
• 25 percent of education respondents will be WFH indefinitely
• Most are NOT looking to move locations, despite predictions in media.
• Process, protocol, and tracking is all company-dependent, and many vary from each other.
• Most do not have a tool that they are using to help reopen as of this time.

Just a reminder, Truework's COVID-19 Employee Health Management Tracking tool can help track health statuses and data to ensure safe workplace environments.

The Results

Our respondent pool was diverse—and ranged from all different industries, company sizes and back-to-work strategies. The majority of respondents—at 22.9 percent—were in the telecommunications, technology, internet, and electronics industry—with the nonprofit and education industries rounding out the top three at 11.4 percent each.

The results also represented a range of company sizes—with the majority of respondents representing companies from 100-500 employees (40 percent.) The breakdown of respondent company size is as follows; 500-2500 employee-sized companies were represented by 31.4 percent of respondents, over 2500 employee-sized companies were represented by 14.3 percent of respondents and less than 100 employee-sized companies were also represented by 14.3 percent of respondents.

When asked if respondents’ companies were “back to work”—we received the following results, with most indicating that they were partially back to work already.

Of the respondents who indicated that they haven’t returned to work, most—at 31.6 percent —were not planning on returning to work until 2021 at the earliest.

When asked what was most important priorities-wise in the back-to-work process, 80 percent of respondents cited safety and health of employees as their top concern.

Regardless of when reopening occurs—it’s clear that workplace capacity will be vastly different from where it stood pre-pandemic. Over half of respondents indicated that their offices would not be operating at full capacity, with 40 percent indicating that capacity would be below 50 percent.

The divide between allowing employees to work from home indefinitely was almost evenly split—with 37.1 percent indicating that they would not, and 40 percent indicating that they would. Many others emphasized that the decision wasn’t set in stone yet, and would be revisited in the coming months.

Contrary to many public articles and reports, 97.1 percent of respondents were not looking to move offices.

For respondents—ensuring a safety of employees was a mix of social distancing, lower occupancy, tracking tools, and COVID-19 tests, with some indicating that they have not yet figured out a solution.

We’re here to help

Ultimately the one thing we do know is that safety is the key component in every reopening process and plan. Ensuring that the workplace remains safe requires extensive planning, monitoring, and employee input.

Luckily, we’re here to help. Truework’s COVID-19 Employee Health Management Tracking tool allows you easily keep track of the health of your employees, send out automatic questionnaires based on EEOC and CDC guidelines, and upload temperature readings whether at the workplace or remote—all while remaining secure on SOC-2 and ISO certified infrastructure.