Three major Connecticut employers — with thousands of office workers in the Hartford area — say they will keep the majority of those employees working at home at least through the end of the year, as the course of the coronavirus pandemic continues to create uncertainty around a return to the workplace.
Health insurer Aetna Inc., the Hartford-based unit of CVS Health Corp.; Raytheon Technologies, which recently acquired Farmington-based United Technologies Corp. and includes Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford; and property-casualty insurer The Hartford employ a combined 21,000 office workers in the state.
“Over the coming months, we will continue rolling out new productivity tools to our remote workers to make their jobs easier and more connected,” Chris Johnson, a spokesman for Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon, said. “We’re also speaking with a number of companies across the country to see how they’re approaching their own returns to see what we might be able to learn from them.”
Connecticut’s infection positivity rate has remained steady at about 1% over the past month after an intense outbreak this spring, even as other states recently have seen massive surges. Even so, there have been reports of flare-ups in Greenwich and the northeastern corner of the state in the past week.
Employers are still operating under constraints of Gov. Ned Lamont’s phased-in, economic reopening plans. Still in phase 2, offices are restricted to 50% capacity, with workers encouraged to work at home as much as possible.
Large companies remain wary of bringing workers back to the office in Connecticut, even with the state’s low infection rate.
“That’s where this is headed,” said Patrick Mulready, senior vice president at CBRE, a commercial real estate services firm in Hartford. “It’s becoming a 2021 thing.”
In mid-spring, large, private employers were talking about office workers returning in July, Mulready said. Then, in late spring, that was shifted to after Labor Day, he said.
“And now, most large employers have pushed that out to January at the earliest,” Mulready said. “I look at it the same way I look at my kids’ back-to-school plan, subject to change at any minute.”
Mulready estimates that just 5% of office workers at large private companies in the Hartford area are regularly working in their offices, perhaps a bit higher in the suburbs, he said, but not by much.
A cautious approach
Last month, tech giant Google grabbed headlines when it was reported that it would not require employees working remotely to return to office until at least July 2021. Google said it expected other large employers to extend work-at-home arrangements.
Karen Lynch, executive vice president at CVS and president of Aetna, said the decision to extend remote working for the majority of office workers was based on current health indicators. Aetna employs about 5,300 in Connecticut, the majority in Hartford.
Aetna has a battery of health measures for those who do come into the office: temperature screenings, wellness self-checks, physical distancing and required face coverings, Lynch said.
Raytheon, which has a workforce of about 18,500 in Connecticut, has more employees coming to work — about half the workforce — because of its manufacturing-based business.
The decision to bring workers back is complex, large companies say, particularly because of being spread out over multiple locations, often across many states.
Bank of America, Connecticut’s largest bank and among the biggest lenders in the country, had targeted after Labor Day for a return. Now, there is no firm date for office workers to return to their workspaces. The bank’s 108 branches in Connecticut have been open.
The bank employs 3,000 in Connecticut — divided between branches and offices — and about 1,700 in the Hartford area, which includes Hartford, Tolland and Middlesex counties, with a headquarters in downtown Hartford.
“The situation is so fluid that we’re going to do this as carefully as possible,” Joseph Gianni, president of the bank’s Hartford market, said. “It’s going to vary on the type of job, their department, their location: Is it in a commercial, multitenant office tower or is it a sole facility? All that is factored into our thinking.”
At Travelers Cos., which has 7,000 employees in the Hartford area, a significant presence in downtown Hartford and offices across the country, the property-casualty insurer is considering moving small numbers of employees back to the office in markets where infection rates are low.
“That wouldn’t be until some time after Labor Day, and it would only be for those who want to come back to the office,” Matt Bordonaro, a Travelers spokesman, said. “We’re thinking about all the things employees have in their lives. Some employees will have kids attending school remotely, or other circumstances that might make it difficult for them to go back to the office.”
On Aug. 3, The Hartford, which employs 6,500 in Connecticut, began the first phase of a voluntary, return-to-work plan involving small numbers of workers in Hartford, Windsor and Farmington. But the vast majority of employees will continue to work from home, according to Matthew Sturdevant, a spokesman for the insurer.
New office procedures
Even a modest return to the office is more than simply swiping a card and sitting down at a desk. Federal and state guidelines require training in new policies and procedures forced by the pandemic. For instance, who will be wiping down work areas, cleaning staff or the employee? And who monitors that the sanitizing is done?
“Another thing that they are going to have to do is restrict common areas, and try to restrict the actual movement of employees,” said David Cadden, professor emeritus of entrepreneurship and strategy at Quinnipiac University in Hamden. “So I don’t know what is going to happen to the old coffee room and the refrigerator where you put your lunch and have your colleagues steal it from you.”
Cadden said he foresees companies also taking a serious look at the potential for employee lawsuits that “Well, you made us come back, and I got sick. And you didn’t do enough to protect me.”
“And although the argument may be that you got it at home or somewhere else, there are going to be lawyers who are going to take those cases,” Cadden said.
Some experts say the pandemic will cause a sea change in the workplace, shifting more workers out of the office to work remotely on a permanent basis.
A broad cross-section of companies have been moving in that direction for years. At Travelers, for instance, 1,700 of its employees in and around Hartford, have some agreement to work remotely, from one to five days a week, and the insurer sees a further shift in that direction as a result of the pandemic.
The state of Connecticut says it will consider the effectiveness of work-at-home longer term once the pandemic passes. Right now, about two-thirds of the state workforce of about 42,000 has either reported to work since the beginning or has divided time between office and home, according to Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer.
Geballe said the state had just started to “dip its toe” into teleworking just prior to COVID-19, but it is too soon tell to what extent work-at-home forced by the pandemic will last long term.
“Many businesses have saved money on real estate facilities costs when you have more of a balance between in-office and remote working,” Geballe said. “There’s opportunities for us — the state — to consolidate our footprint if some of the adjustments we’ve made stick longer term.”
Certainly, the longer delay in office workers returning — or temporary work at home arrangements becoming permanent — will hurt already struggling restaurants and other businesses in downtown corridors in cities like Hartford.
While many also predict a long-lasting blow to leasing in office buildings, CBRE’s Mulready said, it is “almost impossible” to foresee what will happen. Most employers, especially large ones, are focused on “how and when” to reoccupy the office and not looking beyond that.
“In my opinion, just like every other event in our lifetimes, things return to normal,” Mulready said. “It’s not going to happen immediately. We’ll have a year or two of a hybrid market before I think eventually people will return to the office.”
