At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Taft Law Firm kept a skeleton crew inside its IDS Center offices towering above downtown Minneapolis. At what seemed like the drop of a hat, most of the firm's 200 employees were forced out of the office and into remote working situations.
Fast forward to May 2021, the outlook is much, much different.
"We are really moving into a phase where we are inviting people back into the office because we've had a safety plan for quite some time," said Ann Rainhart, Taft's Chief Strategy Officer. "We're all pretty skilled that we're wearing mask, socially distanced, and eating food away from each other."
Taft employees slowly started to trickle back into the office early last summer.
"The skeleton crew stayed in the office for quite some time just to make sure mail and the kinds of things you need to respond to at a law firm kept going," Rainhart said. "We then started developing a plan to bring people who wanted to come back to serve our clients because what our clients needed. We wanted to do that safely."
Rainhart led a COVID-19 taskforce which consulted with an epidemiologist to develop a safe return-to-work plan. The ultimate goal was to ensure employees were safe, and that they felt invited back and not mandated to return.
"We feel really safe in terms of the environment and now it's turning to helping people feel ready to come back in," Rainhart said.
Coming back to an office setting may not be as easy for some people and Rainhart believes it's important to understand how the year has treated everybody differently.
"People developed and now know what they're doing from their homes, so we know it's not going to be a flip of a switch and everything will go back to where we were," she said. "We were all changed by the pandemic. Some of us lost family members to COVID-19, some had COVID, and others are still recovering. We're being mindful that people have been through a lot."
Part of the process for Taft employees returning involves easing back into the office.
"We're inviting people to just come back downtown for a day or come down on the weekend, practice parking, come into the office and see what's there," Rainhart said. "When people do come back in, we're making sure that those of us in leadership are there to say hello. The last thing we want is the office to be empty when someone decides to come back in."
Moving forward, the question of how employees balance working from home and at the office remains a question, but what that doesn't necessarily have a definitive answer.
"We're having discussions about where and how and when do you continue to work at home, in the office, or when you travel. These are discussions that before the pandemic we didn't have in a meaningful way."
With the availability of COVID-19 vaccines increasing in Minnesota, another challenge is approaching employee vaccination rates.
Rainhart says employees are not required to get a vaccine.
"We're really taking an informational and sharing approach," she said. "Those of us who are getting are talking about our experiences and trying to take approach of sharing versus mandating. So far, I think we've had real receptivity to people receiving the vaccine."
