New Omicron Variant May Affect Return to Work Plans, Businesses Say
Wednesday, 1st December 2021
Thanks to the new Omicron variant of COVID-19, many large businesses are reconsidering plans to return to the office, reports suggest.
While little is yet known about Omicron, fears that it could be more transmissible, or vaccine-resistant, are making businesses wary.
Responding to the variant, corporate leaders suggest flexibility and proven safety measures will remain crucial to ensuring employee wellbeing in the future.
Omicron variant poses risk to return to work plans
The discovery of the new COVID-19 variant known as Omicron is likely to affect plans for a full return to the office, businesses have warned.
According to reports in Market Watch, corporate leaders at large businesses including Meta and Wells Fargo are now uncertain about the planned return to work in January 2022.
In a separate announcement, Google confirmed that it would not go ahead with its plans to have all staff return to the workplace by January, although the company did not specify its new timetable.
While little is still known about the possible impact of the variant Omicron, analysts have predicted that “at a minimum” the variant will slow down the return to the office.
But it’s not just large businesses that have sounded the alarm.
The Wall Street Journal this week reported that businesses from delivery companies to law firms and marketing companies are also changing their plans.
"It's important to not catastrophize and not to kind of just jump to the worst, but you've got to take it as a real threat," one logistics executive told the newspaper. "[Omicron] is a risk, and how severe is the risk? We don't know."
How will Omicron change the workplace?
Research is still ongoing into the nature of the new variant, but health experts and commentators are concerned.
“If the omicron variant proves more contagious, more likely to lead to severe illness, or more resistant to current vaccines, I would expect that many employers will extend the timeline on their return to the office plans,” Bradford S. Bell, professor in strategic human resources and director of Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies, has said.
“They may also be more likely to restrict access to the office for those who have started to come back in, particularly if they are confident in their ability to maintain operations with a fully or largely remote workforce.”
For now, though, most big banks say that their plans have not yet changed, Reuters reports. Meanwhile other companies have reported that their strategy is simply to “wait and see” until more is known.
Preparing for future developments
Omicron poses only the most recent delay to return to work plans, as many companies have already postponed plans from September 2021 due to the Delta variant.
Yet now it seems that many businesses are reluctant to delay any further.
Instead, many employers are considering turning to more robust measures—including mask-wearing, continued hybrid working, and even vaccination mandates—to try to keep workplaces safe from future variants, Yahoo Finance has reported.
“The recent emergence of the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) further emphasizes the importance of vaccination, boosters, and prevention efforts needed to protect against COVID-19,” the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said.
“To stop the spread of COVID-19 we need to follow the prevention strategies we know work.”
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