Getting Back to the Office Means Your Every Move Will Be Tracked

in place, they may never go away. Conrad Puts here, reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for how employers plan on tracking you when you come back. Thanks for joining us, Conrad, thanks for having me. I want to talk about what it's gonna look like when all the states reopen and people start going back to work. What it's gonna be like to go back to the office,

and unfortunately, your every move is gonna be watched. Employers are planning a bunch of new tools to measure office interactions, track workers health, and with all these types of things, there's always a privacy concerns, but there's also those things of like, hey, things might seem extreme at first, but it could be the new normal and you'll get used to it later. So Conrad tell us a little bit about what employers are planning to do to get Americans

back to work safely and healthy. So the big thing I think people need to understand is when we go back to the office, it's not going to be like before. It's going to be completely different in a bunch of different ways. So some of the most basic things that employers are doing now is just moving chairs around, putting more distance between desks, just to make sure that there's more social distancing in the office. Companies are cleaning offices

more intensively. So that's all the basic stuff that the companies are doing. Pretty much everyone is doing this, but there's a growing number of companies that are going beyond that that basically say, if we want employees to be really safe when they come back to the office, when you do a lot more. And so what some of these companies are doing is they're basically including surveillance technology

into their offices. And the idea is if you track people better, if you traffic temperature, you track who they interact with, you get a better handle of how a virus might be spending the office and you can prevent it from spreading to basically keep people safer that way. One example, at Rockefeller Center, there's an obviously huge office tower there and the building's owner is gonna set up thermal cameras so they can measure body temperature as employees

go in. They're also going to develop some type of mobile app to monitor and score how closely workers are complying with social distancing. And some of these areas are where there might be some problems in there. But there's a lot of companies that are considering developing mobile apps. That seems to be one of the main players in

all this, and that's a very controversial thing, right. So the idea behind these mobile apps is if you install an app in your employees phone that tracks what they are at any given time, you kind of get a sense of whether they come into contact with someone who's maybe infected. So let's say if someone in your office gets the virus, you can then go back and look at the app and find every single person who is in contact with them, and they need to make sure

that they say at home as well. So that's the idea. It's designed to keep people safe, but at the same time you're also tracking everyone's move at all times, and there are some people who are concerned about this. I talked to one company, and as in the House, based in Massachusetts, which basically said they think that's going too far. They don't want to track every move of their employees. They think that would be intrusive. So there is some

debates going on about that. And thermal cameras is another issue. Right companies are not installing thermal cameras and the lobbies of office buildings that basically take your temperature from AFAR and if you walk in you have a fever, this camera might see this, and then the door might stop you. Again. It could help keep the workplace safe from any sort of infections, but it's also it could arguably kind of invasive,

and there's other options. There's one company called Interpublic. They're toying with the idea of maybe separating their workers into three different levels. With all of these things, they're good ideas, but you're right, there's a lot of problems that could arise out of it, and discrimination things like that that could arise of that. But into public they want to do like a level one. This is somebody that's tested

positive for anybodies, so they're very low risk. Level two would be somebody that is maybe doesn't have the anybodies, but they're moderate to low risk, they're healthy people. And then people over sixty five and have underlying health conditions, they would be a level three. You know, at that point, could you be discriminating against somebody because of their age or because of these health conditions, and even having to

disclose those health conditions could be a problem. So this is something that in the public is considering doing that having decinatively decided if they want to do this yet, but they're very clearly thinking about this. And again the rationality is you you only want to have those people come back to the office that are really safe and that an't is vulnerable to the getting sick, because you want to make sure that people are healthy. That's the idea,

and that's obviously commendable. But the risk here is if you basically tell people who have pre existing conditions, who are smarter, is that they can't come to the offset because they're at risk. The risk here is do you discriminate against them? Right if you can't come to the office. The that many contact part in meetings is that may be bad to your career because you don't get your face in front of other people. There is the danger that that over the years to come, some people might

field that they're being discriminated against. And that's the big debate that some of these companies will have to have is how do you weigh the benefits for more safety against the downside of potentially discriminating over someone's health, and

how do the employers navigate that. You know, the White House has in their guidelines calls for employers to make accommodations for vulnerable workers things like that, but existing employment laws are still in place with regards to discrimination and all that, so that's gonna be a tough thing for them to navigate. And sorry to say, but they'll probably be some lawsuits and things like that as soon as

people really start getting back into the workforce. The new area for companies to navigate, and one expert described this is sort of the wild West, right, because we've never lived to a time like this in a hundred years where there is this pentanic go back to the office. So companies often they're experimenting with a bunch of different things.

They're trying to figure out what works and also companies are waiting for clear guidelines from lawmakers from governments before they decent, if you decide what they want to do. But I think everyone said is confused right now. A lot of companies to try and figure out what to do, and we'll know a lot more than in a few

months to come. Yeah, one of the biggest concerns about all of this is, let's say you put some of these things in place because of the pandemic, and once things kind of slowed down with that, those things are already in place, you're just gonna kind of have to live with them. And there's a lot of parallels to you know, what happened in September eleven, after buildings install these enhanced security measures X rays, a bunch of different

things like that. There's just kind of these parallels that while it might seem intrusive and extreme right now, after a while you'll get used to it and it will be that new normal. Right And all these companies will spend a good amount of money investing in all this technology, installing all this technology, so they'll have an economic incentive to keep it using it. Right, to spend all this money, you don't want to just use it for six months and then when the pendomeic to go over you in

the other stamp. So I think the complaint is just that this you cannot confront. It means that more companies will just keep on permanently doing more surveillance on their own workers. And the mind of revenue analogy is very interesting, right because in New York City, it was a lot easier to go to an office in New York. You wouldn't have to go through your tone style, you wouldn't have to show your idea to anyone at the front desk.

And then I haven't happened. End up changed completely and you started upslaying people's suitcases and garages, cars would gain screen for bombs. So security just got a lot more intense and it never really went away. I mean something did go away, but but in general security just permanently stayed a lot harder, and people got used to it. And they think, for better or worse, a lot of people will will get used to some of these changes

that are happening. Law Conrad puts here reporter at the Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us, thanking him oscar room mirrors and this has been your daily coronavirus update, don't forget the effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on The Daily Dive podcasts every Monday through Friday, so follow us on iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.