CIC’s Safety Plan for Re-opening after Quarantine

Please Note: If you, a member of your team, or a visitor to your company has been presumed positive or has been diagnosed with COVID-19, and has been to a CIC location, please notify us immediately at covid@cic.com.

Last Updated: May 5, 2020

CIC Community,

Many governors are beginning to announce target timetables for re-opening our economies. This will likely be a moving target to some degree, with varying degrees of phased open-ness. At least some form of reopening appears set to come in the next few weeks, and we at CIC are actively getting ready for it. Local leadership will keep clients informed of specific dates and restrictions that apply for each city, once public guidance is clear.

It seems that shared workplaces like CIC may play an important role in the economic recovery. Australia, which is in recovery mode today, is seeing a surge in the use of shared office facilities and NAIOP, the North American Commercial Real Estate Development Association has reached the same conclusion.

With this in mind, please see the below outline of our plan to make our centers safer, healthier workspaces for clients to return. We welcome any insights, ideas, and suggestions on safety planning. We are continually refining this as we learn more. 

CIC’s Safety Plan Going Forward

We have been busy gathering best practices from other parts of the world, reviewing the latest research about transmission, and looking at what US hospitals are doing today to keep their populations safe. Based on this work, we have developed our CIC Safety Plan.  We hope you find this helpful in your own planning.

Here is a quick summary of the full plan:

  • Masks.  We will require face coverings for everyone in common areas. Multiple studies suggest face coverings can have an enormous impact, and they are starting to be required in many cities. We’re working to develop gamification, measurements, and rewards to ensure it happens for as long as necessary. This notion comes from a local hospital. 

  • Touchless.  The new work normal will be “touchless.” We aim to have a “touchless” way for you to do everything you need at CIC. We look to achieve this through various means, including power-doors, foot-operated doors, and the use of a small handheld sanitary device for pushing elevator buttons and such. 

  • Symptom self-checking.  Many large companies and governments are requiring symptom checking prior to going to the office. Related to this, we have launched a web form you will be asked to fill out each morning at home to input your temperatures and any other symptoms prior to coming into the office. Note, this does not track your location or store your answers or identity.  In the future, we may integrate this measure with our building access control cards in order to limit individuals in the building to those who have reported that they are symptom free. We will also have a way for people to check their temps in our lobbies. 

  • More Private Offices.  Private offices will become truly private just for your employees. Unless you request otherwise—perhaps with a “please clean my office” sticker—cleaners will not enter your office, eliminating a possible vector for transmission. We will provide disinfecting wipes for you to clean your own offices. You will be asked to place your trash containers outside your door for the cleaners to empty.

  • Lower capacity.  We will limit capacity in common areas, initially to 5 people, and elevators, initially to 4 people. Conference rooms and co-working desks will utilize a “clean in—clean out” protocol, whereunder you will be asked to disinfect the spaces before and after each use. This precaution will effectively double-disinfect the space between uses. We will continue to regularly deep clean all of our common spaces.

  • Work from home. We are advising companies to use work from home where possible, and moderate the number of staff in the office at the same time.  Use methods to encourage sick employees to stay home. We will continue to add more video conferencing equipment to support more hybrid remote/in-person meetings with those of your staff still working from home.  One method is to consider having your employees come in in shifts, continue to work from home some of the time, etc.

  • Preemptive disinfection.  We will continue to preemptively disinfect common areas on weekends.

  • Distancing.  We encourage companies to keep staff densities in their offices low, and to maintain a 2 meter (6 foot) safe distance everywhere. We are working with all clients to implement the 2 meter distancing between all simultaneously-used desks.  For the time being, we will continue to disallow people to book large, in-person events and tours. 

  • Clear infection protocols.  In the event an infected individual is discovered to have been in our spaces, we will use key-card and video data to ascertain where they have been and disinfect those spaces unless already disinfected through our pre-emptive cleaning. When possible, we will use video to do contact tracing, and will inform those they were in contact with. 

Collectively, this plan will have substantial impact, even as we are still looking at other measures. Thank you for your proactive engagement with us as we work through this together.

Regards,

Tim Rowe

Founder and CEO

CIC


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