About a month ago, President Joe Biden announced that every U.S. adult will be eligible for COVID-19 vaccination no later than May 1^st. Since that announcement, we’ve reached the point where most states have expanded access in an effort to reach this milestone, with states allowing everyone ages 12 and up to get the vaccine. The vaccination pace, while slowing, is reaching more and more people. With that in mind, many are looking for a return to the pre-pandemic sense of “normalcy” that, for a lot of Americans, has not been the reality of life for over a year. For many businesses, financial institutions, and other organizations, bundled with this hope is the idea of having employees make their way back to the office. But with uncertainty in new strains, questions over who is and isn’t vaccinated, employees adjusted to working from home, and fear over a fourth (fifth?) wave of the virus, is it the right decision to bring everyone back? Let’s talk about incorporating risk into that decision.

Uncertainty Abound

If we treat this like a potential risk modeling scenario, our first step is to examine the uncertainty factors that should have an impact on the decision. The first clear-and-present danger (as it has been for the last year and a half) is, of course, COVID-19. But the questions we’re asking now, in many cases, are much different than the questions we asked previously. For example, as the vaccines become more prevalent and more Americans receive them, the return to a pre-pandemic sense of daily life becomes a clearer goal. Yet, we’re seeing a group of Americans (about 1 out of 4, according to NPR) who have no plans on being vaccinated continue to maintain that perspective, which is concerning not only for herd immunity complications, but also given the fact we’re experiencing what could be called another wave of the virus. Even if it’s not a so-called fourth wave, the reality of us continuing to live in a reality where coronavirus cases could spike at any time, especially as we continue to see a rise in variants of COVID-19. While early indications are that the vaccine protects at varying levels against these new variants, there’s enough of a question in folks’ minds to influence their activities, including the question of going back to work. The risk of continued COVID-19 cases (and its variants), for many Americans, is a risk that influences their decisions regarding returning to the workplace.

And that, truly, is the core of what we’re getting at here. At this point, many US office workers have been home for over a year. Those who have previously had a commute of an hour or more are now adjusted to getting additional sleep, spending more time with their families, managing the chaos of being at home with family and living a life removed from the traditional sense of “going to work” in the mornings. Even if there was a black-and-white answer of “the coronavirus has been eradicated,” convincing these workers to go back to a commute-based life would be difficult. Adding in the questions of the virus’s variants and non-vaccinated people complicates the risk analysis dramatically.

What Going Back Means

It is worth asking the question of what institutions gain from everyone returning to work. The most obvious benefit (for most organizations, that is), is that productivity is likely to improve with a full return to the workplace. Harvard Business Review noted that while there were some companies that saw an increase in productivity after the pandemic hit, many (if not most), quote, “struggled mightily.” The time each employee has and the energy an employee can invest in their work has suffered in the quarantine-locked world we found ourselves in during the last year, and much of this revolved around a complete change in scenery for those workers. I have found that conducting consulting projects is now slower as a result of working solely over the internet. Discussions and information that would have been obtained by being on site is now processed through limited time segments. Spontaneity and informal information exchanges have been replaced with scheduled meetings and interactions. And this had made everything slower.

There is also the notion of workplace culture. Workplace staples like watercooler talks and unannounced stops at your coworker’s offices or cubicles simply faded into the background of people’s minds over the last year. Re-establishing that rapport can be extremely beneficial for general productivity and happiness. For many extroverted employees out there (myself included in this number), a return to the workplace means a return to gaining energy from the interactions that used to be a daily occurrence. For the introverts, it might be the opposite: those daily interactions bringing negative emotions and a decrease in energy. The bigger question, then, is whether the impact of returning is a net positive or net negative in terms of personnel morale. If you’re a fairly small organization, you’ll likely have a good sense of the impact going back will have on your team. On the other hand, if your team or organization size is fairly large, this won’t be as straightforward of an answer.

Analyzing the Risk

Given all of that, the question in your mind is probably something along the lines of “well, okay, but what should my organization do?” As you might’ve guessed, it depends on how you weigh these different sources of risk against the potential benefit. This is the role risk management plays in the decision; determining in a formal manner the risk of the decision. If your organization’s productivity has been good enough during the quarantine, maybe holding off is right for you, but the opposite could also be true! However, this is by far a non-comprehensive discussion of the positives and negatives. Only by analyzing your particular sources of risk against the set of benefits across all your teams and workers can you truly determine whether it’s time to go back in, or time to continue in the remote world this last year has created. In many cases, the emotional part of the decision will outweigh the rational component.

One former colleague who is now a Chief Risk Officer said that as a result of the use of her pandemic plan, her firm has scheduled their first day of opening the office. The firm’s offices had, (pre-Covid) in the past, a couple of hundred employees who came to work each day. The first day of opening only had a hand full wanting to come back in the office. That number will drift up but will most likely not return to pre-Covid levels. And the plans to move to an office/space sharing arrangement have been put on hold for the foreseeable future.