As the manufacturer of one of the world's best-selling hand sanitizers, you would expect GOJO Industries to take extra care in getting people safely into the workplace. The firm's methodical approach could serve as a guide for any company facing the same challenges.
The Akron, OH manufacturer of Purell prides itself on its collaboration, so the forced isolation of COVID lockdowns has been a huge blow.
“Before the pandemic, we were almost entirely an in-person culture,” said Emily Esterly, vice president of work ecosystem and employee experience. "We were super collaborative with no closed offices."
The company wanted to maintain this culture while respecting the new needs for social distancing and the wishes of employees who liked to work remotely.
But he didn't want his decisions to appear arbitrary or issue radical policies, especially since many of his lab and manufacturing workers couldn't do their jobs from home. Long before restrictions were lifted, leaders thought long and hard about what the future workplace might look like.
GOJO spent 18 months surveying employees, holding focus groups, and prototyping their office of the future. Hundreds of people participated in the exercise, which aimed to define roles that would fit the expectations of an office presence in the future.
A transparent process
Employee buy-in was essential, which meant language mattered. For example, managers eschewed the term "back to office" in favor of "job to do."
There would be no set return time and employee roles would determine expectations.
In the end, the organizers chose four types of roles.
"Predominantly virtual" jobs require less than 10% of office time and are optimized for mobile workers, such as sales and service. The "Combined Weekly" and "Combined Monthly" roles involve desk work two or three times a week or three or four times a month. "Mostly On Site" is for people who need to be physically present most of the time.
It turned out that the workforce is fairly evenly distributed across each role.
The process has been made as transparent as possible, keeping in mind the need for people to understand why they have been placed in a type of job. “We decided to prototype and test rather than just change things up,” Esterly said. "Take preference out of the equation and go on a job-based basis has created a fairer system. People felt they were part of the process."
There was some flexibility in the roles.
"For each role, there is a percentage of time that we expect him to be in place that is an average for the year," Esterly said. "A person can be on the site all the time for a while and then off the site for a while."
Two categories of events that require a physical presence have been identified: site-specific tasks, such as lab work, and "highlights," which are general meetings, onboarding, training, and chartering of new equipment.
From offices to neighborhoods
The design of the offices has been redesigned to reflect the role of the transformed workplace as a collaborative space rather than a collection of offices.
The Akron headquarters is being rebuilt around "neighborhoods," or open spaces for in-person meetings. In addition, the concept of "back offices" was created to describe personal spaces equipped with function-specific equipment that people in virtual and mixed roles can take when they come to the office.
"We were an open office to begin with, so it wasn't much different than what we had before," Esterly said. "It was more about removing some of the office density and moving to walk-ins."
GOJO was fortunate to have standardized on a single collaboration platform shortly before the pandemic. A cohesive set of tools for file sharing and conference calls has been "wrapped into the way we work to empower employees to perform at their best regardless of location," said CIO Brian Carr. So when COVID hit, " we were able to get it off the shelf."
Special attention was paid to meeting technology.
“We have built an integrated business collaboration platform that has been part of the glue that has held us all together,” said Carr. “We have provided good conference phones that scale to the size of the room so those who are working virtually can hear and feel part of it”. Also, virtual whiteboard technology has been so well received that it is now used even when all hands are present.
GOJO created a video to describe their new ecosystem of work and describes the process on their blog.
Organizations wondering how to return to work in a way that is inclusive and logical can learn a few things from his example.
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