Masked man receives vaccination on arm by a female medical professional

Pandemic Content: Return to Office

In 2022, Accenture wanted to encourage employees to return to the office. People were tiring of Covid rules, but this audience continued to love stories of pandemic heroism. And, as always, they flocked to "explainers." So that's what I gave them.

The goal of this story was to dispel lingering anxiety about contagion in the offices. It did so by skipping right over that doubt like it was a thing of the past. Instead, it celebrated the colleagues who made it safe, and explained how they did it.

(During the pandemic, I took the unusual step of writing some stories myself, rather than assigning them to my team. This is one.*)

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How our Workplace heroes helped protect us from Covid

By Julie Roth | 30 March 2022

Two years ago, some 95% of us in Accenture left our offices to work from home. No one knew how long we’d be away. Or what the world would be like when we came back.

But some of our colleagues knew one thing: When the time came, those offices would be safe for our return. Those colleagues are the 7,000 people of Geographic and related services, and this is how they made that happen.

Closing the offices

These are the same people who set us up for remote work in the first place:

Workplace planning and coordinating our evacuation.
Procurement Plus purchasing all the work-from-home and personal protection equipment.
Local Technology Support (LTS) equipping everyone with the laptops and desktops and secure VPN access to work from home.
Legal Contract Management negotiating exceptions to contractual obligations to work in certain locations.

And they had to do it at lightning speed. In one week we sent out more than 80,000 desktop computers and purchased more than 33,000 Wi-Fi hotspots.

“We had a lot of locations that essentially closed down overnight,” remembers Lisette Smyrnios, our global workplace director. “In Mauritius, the government gave 24-hour notice that all employers had to shut their offices! The workplace team was loading vans all night to get desktops and laptops to people’s homes.”

Prepping the offices

As soon as the offices were emptied, planning began for our return.

A team of leaders across all the disciplines met almost daily for the past two years about it. “Let’s just say there were a lot of very early morning, evening and weekend calls as the situation was constantly changing,” says Lisette. “Every step of the way, senior leadership was very thoughtful about every single decision being made.”

Working from guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control, and the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration — plus the expertise of our own Arlin Pedrick, Chief Security Officer and holder of a Masters degree in epidemiology — they determined what it would take to make all 36 million square feet of our office space around the world safe for our return.

For example, Lisette says they analyzed airflow in all 800 of our offices. Where we lease the entire building, they were able to upgrade the filters in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. In other buildings they ran the HVAC longer to better clean the air. In some of the older buildings, they opened the windows. In others they added portable air filtering units. Lisette says they often used a combination of these measures to clean the air in our offices.

Airflow was just one of the things our Workplace colleagues took care of.

“We evaluated everything,” says Lisette. “Every office went through a 100-point checklist to get the offices ready to bring back our people.”

That “checklist” is actually a 128-slide PowerPoint deck, with instructions for things like:

Daily deep cleaning: wiping down doorknobs, countertops, refrigerators and every other high-touch surface several times per day
Replacing hand dryers with touchless paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms
Setting up one-way traffic patterns in the floorplans and stairwells to keep people socially distanced
Taping oﬀ every other desk, bathroom stall or urinal to ensure proper distancing
Making hand sanitizer and disposable masks available around the globe
Providing gloves for our LTS people who had to handle equipment
Replacing open food with pre-packaged food in the break rooms

It also specified when to require masks, testing, temperature checks and wellness surveys as a condition of entry

“I have not heard or seen from anyone in any company that has gone as far as we’ve gone with taking care of our people,” says Lisette. “Going above and beyond, as an employer, it’s just part of our DNA.”

In fact, she says, “one of the biggest challenges was our standards were always higher than local governments’. We required face masks.

We required testing. We required social distancing, even as things were softening up. This kept our people safer, which was our primary goal, and that in turn supported our resiliency when it came to client delivery.”

Approval to reopen

When the infection rates in a region came down, and there was business demand, the offices could reopen, in waves — filling to only 10% of capacity in wave one, to 100% capacity as they exited the wave program.

To reopen an office, or move it up to the next wave, our Workplace colleagues had to document their 100-point checklist and submit it for approval by the Workplace Covid Advisory Board:

Margaret Smith – Geographic Services Senior Managing Director
Arlin Pedrick – Chief Security Office, Global Assistance and Protection
Erin Harris – Business Resilience Services Managing Director
Lisette Smyrnios – Workplace Managing Director

By the end of 2021, the vast majority of our offices were approved to reopen. But that wasn’t the end of it: 13,000 office check-ups were conducted in 2021 to monitor compliance at the office level.

Amanda marvels at the sheer scale of it all. “How we could mobilize so quickly and at such scale globally. To be able to come together so quickly, globally — and really as One Accenture. Just to know we work for a company that could do that!”

“And it was all built in real time,” says Ron Marek, our North American workplace director. “There wasn’t really any playbook for something at this scale. We were solving in the moment.”

What now?

“We’ve moved beyond waves now,” says Lisette. “We feel that we are at a point in time that we are comfortable now moving more toward aligning with local protocols, rather than our own more stringent ones.”

The restrictions on team meetings and catering have stopped. In many offices, masks are recommended now versus required. Most offices are now safe enough to even stop social distancing. But some innovations will remain.

Health champions

More than 5,000 of our colleagues, across every office and client location, will continue to serve as health champions. In that role, they make sure our people are following the health protocols of that office and also advocate for our people when they have concerns about colleagues or clients who aren’t following health protocols.

Search Locations tool

A new “Search Locations” tool on Accenture Portal will continue to help us plan our office visits with information about office status (Is it open? Is a reservation required?) and safety protocols (Are masks, tests or vaccination proof required?). And the digital check-in will continue to be used for visitors and guests in more than 500 offices.

Looking back

Looking back, what stands out for Ron is the investment. “Everything that we did was always in consideration for the health and wellbeing and safety of our people,” he says. “I mean, it was more about caring for people than about making money as a business. What was really impressive to me was to see the leadership and the people around the leadership all stand up to really make sure that everyone is doing everything they can to get us through the pandemic.”