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EMPLOYEE SCREENING & TESTING Changing Times, Changing Workplaces sodawhiskey/stock.adobe.com How does the shift to remote work impact your company’s evolving strategies for implementing effective drug testing policies for your remote employees? BY YVETTE FARNSWORTH BAKER, ESQ. One of the biggest disruptions to the workplace in recent years was the seismic and almost instantaneous shift to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By June 2020, less than 30 percent of U.S. employees were working on their business premises.1 While at the time most people anticipated that changes would be temporary, after a few years of uncertainty one thing is clear: remote working will be a significant part of the future. The Future of the Workplace Recent years have alleviated some major concerns about working from home. For one, the vast majority of employers and employ- ees have reported that productivity has not suffered. In a 2020 survey, 86 percent of respondents reported that they were fully productive while working from home.2 However, many execu- tives still cite concerns about remote work productivity, and are implementing return-to-work policies for at least a few days a week.3 Additionally, 78 percent of office workers reported in the same survey that they had the resources they needed to work suc- cessfully from home, despite the fact that remote work sprang on most industries rather abruptly in 2020. It is also clear that employees want to continue to work re- motely into the future. Seventy-six percent of respondents in the above-cited survey want to work from home a few days per week. Similarly, 89 percent of executives believe that most or many em- ployees will work from home at least one day per week on a per- manent basis.4 Companies are taking notice of the shift and its long-term ramifications. At the end of 2020, 87 percent of executives planned to make changes to their company’s real estate portfolio in 2021.5 In one example, retailer REI announced that it would sell its brand new, unused corporate campus in Washington, so that the company could “lean into remote working as an en- grained, supported, and normalized model.”6 As of September 2023, average office occupancy rate in the top 10 cities in the U.S. was at only 47.3 percent of pre-pandemic levels.3 How Employees Will Connect As working from home is here to stay, employers are looking for new ways to incorporate collaboration and teamwork into the www.ohsonline.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2024 | Occupational Health & Safety 43