When I called David Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, he was working on figuring out how to use Zoom, a video conferencing application, to teach.
“I’ve been preparing for this, but it turns out I have more to do,” he told me.
UC Berkeley is one of a rising number of universities that have canceled in-person classes in an effort to slow what experts describe as the largely inevitable spread of the coronavirus.
Large employers across California have taken similar steps, ordering employees to work from home or postpone all but the most vital travel.
As The San Francisco Chronicle noted, there’s no clear endpoint for many of the measures. The situation, as we’ve reported, is changing at an almost overwhelming pace.
But I was curious about what will stick after the states of emergency are drawn down.
I spoke with Levine about workplace hygiene and why major employers should research best practices for themselves. Here’s our conversation, edited and condensed:
Tell me about what’s at the front of your mind in the midst of this outbreak.
So I’m an economist, I work a lot on health — on behavior change, including hand-washing.
What’s clear is that everybody knows they should wash their hands after they use the toilet. Years of research have found that people don’t, but they do if someone is watching.
And what my research has found is that organizational routine is important.
When you walk into a doctor’s office, there’s often hand sanitizer, but it shouldn’t be a question of whether people use it.
In a business, we also need standard procedures for cleaning surfaces, which require schedules, monitoring, incentives and sufficient supplies — you need this for everything a lot of customers or staff are touching.
My last point would be, good hygiene could help make all Americans a lot safer. But by itself, the U.S. cannot protect itself from a global outbreak. The U.S. and other industrialized nations should be working rapidly to subsidize hygiene practices around the globe.
So that’s all sort of what should have happened or should be happening. What are you actually seeing in the work force? And could some of those things become a new normal?
In the short run, the CDC and others have recommended social distancing and working from home is an important part of that. All the work from home is sort of an interesting experiment.
During big transit strikes, for instance, some people find new ways to commute and they don’t go back.
So organizations may find that allowing work from home is at least as effective as the old ways. I don’t expect it to be universal, but I think there will be some institutional learning that comes from this tragedy.
What would our economy look like if that’s the case?
For as long as the internet has been around, there’s been increasing opportunities for dispersed teams to work together. This disruption may accelerate that movement, but it didn’t invent it.
Do you have any advice for big employers?
What I stressed earlier is the CDC should be doing research.
But big employers, like Uber and McDonald’s, have a big incentive to research, too, and determine their best practices. Ride-share companies need to figure out what combination of tissues and hand sanitizer in the back seat and wiping down seats they should do.
Every senior living facility has the capability to become a tragic news story. To a lesser extent, every grocery store chain and ride-share company and fast-food company could become known as a center of epidemic spread. So they have an incentive to disseminate new routines.
Any other thoughts?
Workers are going to be going to work because they can’t afford to take time off. It would be an excellent time for the federal government to use some combination of Medicare and unemployment insurance to pay for sick leave and COVID-19 testing.
Because having someone avoid testing so they can keep going to work is a guaranteed route for very rapid spread of the virus.
When we’re thinking about some sort of stimulus, we should think about directing it to cover the sick leave and testing of those affected. It would cover the right people because if there aren’t very many sick people, the government won’t have to write that many checks.
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