Companies consider abandoning open office layouts to prevent disease spread
The best way to prevent spreading diseases at the office is to not require your employees to go to the office - assuming WFH is compatible with the company's business.I work at a FAANG company which was aggressively opposed to WFH before the covid-19 crisis. As matter of fact, I recently changed teams within said company and during the informational interview I asked about the team's policy on WFH - the answer was that "our team has a strong 'collaborative in-the-office' culture, so we don't encourage WFH"I am not kidding, we're talking about one of the most advanced companies in history and they required domestic travel+hotel for trivial half-day, mostly passive interview training that could have been done easily over teleconference, that's how much this company values physical presence.Fast forward a few months, everybody is WFH in the company and the sky hasn't fallen. Actually, my productivity vastly increased because I'm fortunate to have a solid WFH environment at home (despite kids/wife around).While I'm not proposing mandatory WFH for tech companies, neither saying that it works for everybody, I believe our top companies could lead and finally allow people who demonstrate that they can be productive at home to just stay home - permanently.