Mar 12, 2020 _ news

Back to Work in Beijing

Their smiles were covered by surgical masks, but as our coworkers started rolling back into GBBN’s Beijing office this Monday, it was clear that they were happy to be back. (Don’t worry, they don’t have to wear the masks all the time – they were just celebrating the arrival of a long-delayed care package of masks and hand sanitizer).

With 22 employees working on a range of projects, including multifamily housing, mixed-use developments, and workplace projects, GBBN’s Beijing office had been closed since January, when the scale of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak became clear and the government introduced travel restrictions just ahead of the Lunar New Year (Chunyun) celebrations – a time in which some three billion trips are made within China.

When everyone left the office on Friday, January 24^th, most anticipated travelling and visiting family for a week before returning to the office. No one planned on working remotely for all of February.

But after travel restrictions were imposed, GBBN employees in Beijing found themselves stuck at home. One worker wasn’t even able to visit his parents, though they were only a five-minute walk away.

Though unexpected, the office was not unprepared to work remotely. The technological side of the transition was surprisingly easy. So many of the Beijing office’s functions are integrated into WeChat—a platform that allows for spontaneous meetings between project teams, messaging, screen sharing, file transfers, and phone calls—that communications between project teams were only minimally disrupted. Meetings with clients began being held on Zoom, which had not been widely adopted previously.

Shared files could be accessed from GBBN’s VPN, though people would occasionally run into the office to download some large files directly from the server. (Going into work was discouraged, but travel restrictions within Beijing did allow this. You just had to register when you entered your office building so you could be tracked in the event that you were exposed to the virus). When people did have to stop by the office, GBBN minimized risk of exposure by creating a schedule to ensure that only one person was there at a time.

But the bigger challenge of working remotely did not have a technological solution. The problem was physical space: With most offices and all the schools within Beijing closed, whole families were forced to set up their work, school, and play spaces all within their own, relatively small living quarters.

While GBBN employees joked that “our commutes were cut down from an hour on the subway to the time it took to roll out of bed,” for many, the whole family working from home meant sharing kitchen tables with one’s spouse and children, setting up portions of their bedrooms as classroom space, or cobbling together desks for their laptops and extra screens wherever they could find room.

It was not only crowded, but it involved simultaneously supervising one’s children to make sure they weren’t playing videogames on half of their screen while logged into remote school lessons on the other half.

Other distractions were less expected. GBBN Principal Ivan Cheung, noted hearing reports that “it didn’t take long for people’s cats to go from being happy that their owners were home all the time to jumping on keyboards to protest the attention that was being paid to screens instead of them.”

As things return to normal in Beijing and our United States offices are initiating preparedness plans, everyone at GBBN is happy to have our coworkers back in the office, safe and healthy.