Goodbye, cubicle culture. Sacramento employers look to keep workers at home — maybe forever

Nearly four months after sending most of its employees to work in the back bedrooms and dens of their homes during the coronavirus pandemic, SMUD was about to call some back to the office this month.

Now, with the coronavirus infections surging again in the Sacramento area, even that cautious return — totaling just 140 workers, brought in gradually — has been tabled until late September. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District wants to “make sure that we aren’t re-entering, just to have to be sent home again,” spokeswoman Lindsay VanLaningham said.

It’s not as if SMUD is in any hurry. After completing a mad scramble in mid-March to get 1,300 employees working from home, SMUD has decided telecommuting is working out surprisingly well — and could serve as a model for how the utility does business permanently.

Not that the utility plans to keep everyone home and shut down its East Sacramento campus.

“The future will be a hybrid,” said Laurie Rodriguez, SMUD’s director of human resource services. “Post-pandemic, employees will come into campus, but not five days a week. Teams will come in for collaborative sessions. ... We are going to maintain the collaborative work environment that is a part of SMUD culture, while at the same time allow employees to (work remotely).”

COVID-19 is changing cubicle culture in Sacramento, maybe forever.

Not only are most employers treading cautiously about reopening their offices, but many are also envisioning a new kind of workplace where many of their employees do their jobs from home at least part of the time.

This includes the largest single employer in all of Sacramento: the state.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration wants 75 percent of the state’s workforce to remain home, at least part-time, for the foreseeable future. He’s also directed state agencies to devise ways of making telework permanent for as many state workers as possible. About 93,000 area residents work for the state, not counting university employees, representing about 10 percent of all jobs in the region.

“The COVID-19 crisis accelerated a conversation already underway about modernizing state workforce practices,” said Amy Palmer, deputy secretary at the state Government Operations Agency. “We are working hard to learn from this experience so we can apply those lessons in the future.”

Workplace experts say they aren’t surprised that more employers are embracing telework as a permanent fixture. Suzy Taherian, a lecturer at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, said bosses and employees alike have found in the past four months that working from home is agreeable in most cases.

“For a lot of folks, they’ve adjusted, adapted,” Taherian said. “It’s working pretty well. ... They have laptops, they have connections, they have the routine down.”

And she said many employers, after spending heavily on laptops and other equipment to get their workers set up at home, aren’t in a huge hurry to bring everyone back into the office.

A Sacramento law firm reopens

Some employers are eager to bring their employees back, saying they believe the office environment promotes focus and precision among some employees that the home workplace doesn’t.

Among the first to bring back its employees is Dreyer Babich Buccola Wood Campora. The Sacramento law firm, which specializes in representing victims of personal injuries, is throwing open the doors Monday at its office on Bicentennial Circle near Power Inn Road.

Managing partner Roger Dreyer said that while most employees have adapted to the work-at-home regime, the 110-employee firm as a whole was suffering from not being in the office.

“Some staff can do it, some staff can’t,” Dreyer said. “We’re seeing it. We’re seeing the level of accuracy and performance is impacted. We’ve got to protect our clients.”

He said the past few months have been particularly difficult for those with children at home. “You’re sitting there in your pajamas and you’re taking care of your family — we had so many people with school shutdowns, they’ve become homeschoolers. .... You can’t do your job at the same level.”

He said the office has been open all along for limited use, such as pre-trial depositions and other meetings that had to be conducted in person, without anyone getting infected as a result. The firm has taken multiple precautions to guard against coronavirus spreading: acrylic shields in front of the reception desk, coffee dispensers tucked out of sight and hand sanitizer available all over the 40,000-square-foot office. Everyone is required to wear masks, and signs have been posted to create one-way traffic flows in corridors.

Dreyer said employees anxious about COVID-19 will be allowed to stay home, but he isn’t aware of any resistance to the decision to return to the office.

If the pandemic continues to get significantly worse, he said the firm would consider sending everyone back home.

“We’re lawyers who protect people who’ve been injured,” he said. “So, yeah, we’re extraordinarily sensitive to it and monitoring it.”

Most Sacramento employers stand pat

Zoom group meetings have become a workplace phenomenon since March. But they only go so far.

Taherian said having employees work remotely has created problems for some companies, particularly when it comes to making major decisions. Conducting job interviews has been especially difficult.

“It’s hard for the candidate to get a sense of what the culture is like, what the company would be like to work for,” the UC Davis expert said.

It can also be hard to maintain morale and keep employees engaged in the company or agency’s mission. “When you need to build connection, that’s hard to do,” she said. “We need interaction. People are missing out on that.”

But the threat of COVID-19 means most big public- and private-sector employers in the Sacramento area are keeping the office closed.

They include such companies as Intel Corp.’s Folsom campus and VSP Global, the Rancho Cordova vision-insurance and eyewear company. The Sacramento Bee and its parent The McClatchy Co. are keeping most employees home until Labor Day. About 85 percent of CalPERS’ employees are home, and about 92 percent of CalSTRS’ workers.

The cautionary approach is reflected in travel data. In the first month of the economic shutdown, work-related travel, including commuting, fell by 50 percent in Sacramento County, according to a Bee analysis of Google Mobility statistics. By early July, it had increased somewhat but was still down 41 percent compared to miles traveled before the pandemic struck.

One state agency, the California Air Resources Board, says keeping most workers away from the office has had a bonus effect: It’s helped the agency fulfill its mission of figuring out how to reduce air pollution.

As vehicle traffic declined statewide in the early months of the pandemic, studies conducted by CARB revealed a 20-percent reduction in ozone-forming pollutants and a 50 percent drop in fine particulate emissions.

“This has demonstrated the potential for telework to really improve air quality in California,” said Michael Benjamin, CARB’s chief of air quality planning and science.

Yet Benjamin acknowledged the toll the pandemic is taking on the agency’s employees. “We found a little erosion of the social fabric,” he said. “People are missing those impromptu conversations in the hallway — go to lunch and build those personal relationships.“

Two companies eye future workplace

For some employers, it boils down to putting a value on their office space.

SkySlope Inc., a young Sacramento tech company that makes software for real estate brokers, operates from an industrial-style office a block from Golden 1 Center.

The site has a Silicon Valley feel, with exposed ceilings, a ping-pong table and other trappings of a cool tech company. That’s no accident — SkySlope believes its office is very much part of its identity, particularly when it recruits workers.

“We have this awesome office space. It’s a real draw. We are not planning on moving,” said Christine Foster, marketing director. “We are big, big fans of the downtown renaissance. Supporting that has been high on our list of priorities.”

COVID-19 sent the company scrambling. It furloughed 44 workers and sent most everyone else home. It has now been reconfiguring its office layout to create more social-distancing space. Although anyone who wants to, can still work at home, Foster said she’s ready for the return.

“It is refreshing to be in the office,” she said.

DowneyBrand, an old-line Sacramento law firm that takes up three floors of a Capitol Mall office tower, sees it differently.

When the economy began shutting down in March, the firm sent about 130 of its 150 lawyers and other workers home. Productivity took a hit early on as employees struggled with the abrupt transition, and there continue to be challenges large and small.

The firm’s collaborative culture has suffered somewhat, and it’s been harder to integrate young people into the fold. Managing partner Scott Shapiro said his annual backyard cocktail party for summer associates – normally a great opportunity for these potential future employees to rub elbows with senior partners — was replaced by a less-sociable Zoom call.

Still, the firm is no hurry to bring people back en masse. The latest plan is to keep the vast majority of employees home through the end of summer.

What’s more, DowneyBrand is looking at making a long-term commitment toward telework.

Shapiro sees a time — perhaps in four years, when the firm’s lease runs out — when many of its staff would stay home one or two days a week.

“That would decrease the footprint of the firm,” he said. “We would take up less space.”

This story was originally published July 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM.