A “critical part” of pharmaceutical company AbbVie’s success is “face-to-face” interaction, CEO Richard Gonzalez explained in an Aug. 27 email outlining its process for bringing thousands of U.S.-based employees back to work.
Gonzalez said “cross-functional collaboration” was a cornerstone of AbbVie’s high performance, adding that employees needed to “preserve and nurture our culture so we can continue to accelerate, to climb higher and to help the next generation of patients.”
All of that, he said, “means returning to our workplace,” according to the email viewed by CNBC. The company expects employees — even those who say they’ve been able to work from home just fine — to report to the office to foster creativity and innovation under its phased-in return-to-work plan, according to interviews with three current employees, anonymous complaints in public forums and internal company documents....
...Other drugmakers have announced flexible work-from-home policies. Novartis, for instance, has said its workers can return on-site voluntarily without any pressure to do so. Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson is bringing employees back in “waves as it is safe to do so,” spokeswoman Lisa Cannellos told CNBC. The company declined to say when its return-to-work program would begin. Cannellos said it’s currently offering “flexible work arrangements for those who need it based on dependent care or underlying health conditions.”
Really depends on the office. If it's a scenario where an office (especially AbbVie!) can have access to plenty of tests, lots of good airflow analysis, plenty of masks and lots of social distancing, then... that might be all right. Returning to February 2020? That ain't happening any time soon...
Since a lot of the chemical industry has continued going in as part of "essential operations" at their respective companies, it would be interesting to know how companies have handled positive tests when they come up. Who gets sent home, for how long, what qualifies as "close contact,", etc. For instance, according to HIPAA you are not allowed to talk about employees' health to other employees, but that is exactly what has to be done when there are positive tests.
ReplyDeleteI know at my place its fairly hush-hush when there are positive tests. Only those deemed "in close contact" are sent home for quarantine.
At my large pharma, close contact means closer than 6 ft for more than 10 min (wearing masks of course). Currently, the way everything is set up with only lab folks back on site, we are never in close contact with anyone. So for the few positive tests announced, it hasn't resulted in quarantine of anyone else, as far as I know.
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