ROPES & GRAY — MEMO — REOPENING PLAN
Thanks to the many of you who were able to join us for today’s town hall. For those of you who missed it, we wanted to share a summary of the meeting particularly our recommendations on office use, and the guiding principles that shape those recommendations.
The vision:
In the communities where we have offices, there is positive news about the fight against COVID-19, including steadily increasing vaccination rates and decreasing rates of cases and transmission. With this news, we are able to consider what comes next in terms of in-office life. This transition is a significant one, and there are many variables that may yet change our plans. And so, we’ll start slow, with a phased, flexible approach:
Phase 1 (now through the summer)—experience the office if you can. As we mentioned in our February message, our permissive, and entirely optional, use of the offices continues into September.
Phase 2 (targeted for the week of Sept. 13)—we recommend that you spend time in the office more regularly, one to two days a week.
Phase 3 (likely November through 2022)—we will look for a more regular rhythm to office life, and recommend that you spend the majority of your work week (three days a week) in the office.
No matter what phase we are in, we endorse flexibility post-pandemic. We don’t expect that we’ll ever mandate a five-day a week in-office environment.
Principles:
Health and safety concerns will always come first in our planning, and we are guided by science. We know we may need to adjust our approach and timeline depending on what happens with the pandemic.
These are recommendations. We understand that individual circumstances will vary, as they always have. We trust our lawyers; we expect you will exercise professionalism and business judgment on office use against the backdrop of these recommendations, just as you did before the pandemic.
Understanding, flexibility and adaptability are key. We understand you need time to adapt to returning to the office. It’s also a time of great uncertainty, and many of you have been seeking guidance and greater specificity about our recommendations for office use in the fall. We will be patient and supportive, knowing that transitioning back to the office presents new challenges.
We heard from you, and we agree, that in-person camaraderie, knowledge sharing, training and connections are fundamentally important. Teamwork requires trust, familiarity and rapport, and being together matters.
We balance this strongly held belief about the benefits of being in the office with the knowledge that Ropes is about people, not place.
We will learn as we go, and make adjustments along the way. And we understand that different states and geographies may face different circumstances; our approach therefore may vary by region. We’ll keep communicating with you, and we welcome your feedback. We hope that you’ll consider signing up for a focus group, which help greatly in our planning.
Julie and David
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.