San Diego workers still sheltering at home might be surprised to find their workplace looking different when they return.

Efforts are underway across the region to transform offices, restaurants and stores with sneeze guards, signs reminding people to socially distance and plastic barriers between desks.

The new normal, cautions Gensler architect Darrell Fullbright, will take time to execute. “The idea that we’re just going to throw a switch and everybody is going to come back to work, that’s not going to happen.”

As businesses ramp up for the inevitable day when they can restart their operations, it will take a village of local enterprises to pave the way and ensure a safe work environment. San Diego companies and some outside the county are involved in just about every aspect of preparations, spanning high-tech sanitation to legal advice, outside-the-box design and medical equipment.

Creation of the post-COVID workplaces has meant long hours for one small National City business. San Diego Plastics, with a crew of 14, has been helping source plastics and manufacture hundreds of different projects designed to shield people from the coronavirus contagion.

The 33-year-old company has fulfilled orders to create plastic barriers at Paradise Valley Hospital, sneeze guards at all the Popeyes chicken outlets in San Diego County, plastic partitions inside cars for Uber drivers, and materials for personal protective equipment for BMW Precision Manufacturing.

Some of its other customers include Costco, Sprouts, the city of San Diego, U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, 7-Eleven and the Lakeside Union School District.

Steven Stacy, a sales director at San Diego Plastics, said business is up 20 to 30 percent compared to the same time last year.

He said the company normally just distributes plastic sheet, rods, tubes and film. But the demand has meant fabricating all sorts of new shapes to make workplaces feel safe for a wide variety of companies.

“Almost anything with plastic we can do,” he said.

Stacy said a company will contact San Diego Plastics with the dimensions and photos of what it wants to do, for instance, installing sneeze guards. The company then gets plastic from manufacturers in Ohio and Iowa.

But shortages are starting to crop up across the nation for various reasons, Stacy noted. A plastics manufacturer in Canada that San Diego Plastics worked with is shut down. And it is completely sold out of the thin material used to make plastic face shields.

A lot of thinking about what the workplace of the future will look like is being done at the San Diego office of architecture firm Gensler. The San Francisco-based company is known for high-profile projects like the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.

Kevin Heinly, a managing principal at Gensler San Diego, said the firm is getting calls from clients around the world about how to retool workspaces. He said some companies will install barriers like sneeze guards, and others were already in the middle of a redesign and want to make more changes. But, how quickly they can do it depends on the business.

“We’ve spoken to some clients that say they really have no intent of returning to their office until January,” he said, “and others that want to get back into the office this summer.”

Heinly said a lot of Gensler’s work in the short term has been creating decals to remind workers to maintain social distance, as well as voice-activated tools that can help limit touching. In the long term, they are looking at concepts aimed at air quality and surfaces that are easier to clean, similar to how many hospitals are designed.

San Diego has the advantage of being able to use a lot of natural air throughout buildings, unlike areas throughout the world that have more extreme temperatures and higher air pollution, Heinly pointed out.

A lot of his ideas include natural ventilation methods to flush out pollutants. Some of those include so-called living walls, with plants known to target indoor air pollutants.

Gensler studied the use of living walls at its Shanghai office and produced a report called “Why Walls Should Live” that explained the wall was able to reduce the amount of particulate matter in a control room. Heinly said there is no scientific research that extra plants could stop the spread of a virus, but it is part of an overall conversation about how to make workspaces healthier and safer.

“People want to be in buildings that contribute to their health and wellness,” he said.

Gensler has three offices in China and its U.S. branches are taking note of what companies there are doing to reopen, said Gensler architect Darrell Fullbright. Chinese businesses have made adjustments to seating arrangements and elevator use, for instance, and companies in the United States already are looking at taking similar steps.

Fullbright said only four people at a time may be allowed in elevators of large office buildings, which could create a long queue of people in the lobby or upstairs. One solution might be to have staggered work hours so people are not arriving and leaving at the same time.

For people who don’t want to wait for an elevator, one stairway could be reserved for going upstairs and the other for going down to avoid the chance of people passing each other in tight quarters, he said. And in what might be compared to a Disneyland Fast Pass system, people may be assigned specific times to show up to avoid lines, Fullbright said.

Gensler, who designed The San Diego Union-Tribune’s downtown office, said the company has software in its system that could help retool workspaces to meet social distancing guidelines.

Restrooms, Fullbright said, will have signs about occupancy restrictions, and may be re-designed so they no longer have doors, which already is a common feature in many airports.

In the future, Fullbright said employees may have a Bluetooth function on their smartphones that will track their location and automatically call elevators and open doors for them, reducing things they would have to touch during the day.

Bill Rogers was days away from opening his Liberty Call Distilling restaurant and bar at Mercado del Barrio in Barrio Logan when the stay-at-home orders shut him down.

Despite the huge setback, he shifted his business to make hand sanitizer. For more than a month, he’s been producing his own, using a Federal Drug Administration formula.

After a news report surfaced about his side business, he started getting calls from Amazon, UPS, the military and places as far away as Maryland.

So far his distilling staff has produced 8,000 gallons of sanitizer and sold it at 50 cents per ounce, $8 per pint and $64 per gallon. He has given away 4-ounce samples to friends, businesses and others in need and will place bottles on his tables at Liberty Call when indoor service resumes. He currently sells takeout food out front.

“Now it’s become kind of a gold rush and a lot of companies have caught on to it,” he said.

The San Diego Distillers Guild says 10 other local companies also are making sanitizer.

“We pegged ours to be cheaper than Purell. We don’t want to seem like a war profiteer,” Rogers said.

As we all obsessively wash our hands multiple times a day and wipe down our groceries after we return home from shopping, so too are business owners looking to keep everything frequently sanitized and virus-free. No surprise then that the companies who specialize in sanitation and the businesses that source such products are far busier than normal.

Waxie Sanitary Supply, the largest distributor of janitorial and sanitary supply products in the county, has seen a 200 to 300 percent increase in demand for such products since the pandemic-fueled shutdown, said General Manager Lee Jackson, whose company is a supplier for everyone from small offices, schools and restaurants to casinos, Legoland and the San Diego Zoo.

“The issue is manufacturing capacity; the manufacturers don’t have the ability to keep up with that kind of demand,” Jackson said. “We’re seeing extended lead times on some items from two weeks to two months. So we consult with customers so they’re not narrowly focused on one specific item.

The zoo, for example, was intent on purchasing a particular type of hand sanitizer but Waxie pointed out that it would take too long to get it and instead advised the zoo to opt for a different product that could be delivered more speedily.

Sometimes companies have to get creative when it comes to finding a product that is simply unavailable like hand sanitizer stands. One of Waxie’s partners, GOJO Industries, the maker of Purell, devised a stand essentially made of cardboard, Jackson said.

“They’re now en route to San Diego,” he said. “The county of San Diego placed a full order for a truckload of these after not being not being able to source the stands.”

Sysco, a global food supplier for the hospitality industry, with a large operation in San Diego, is also seeing a marked increase in demand for sanitizing products and surgical masks for its customers. Supply, though, is limited and as restaurants eventually prepare to reopen in the coming weeks or months, demand should increase exponentially, said Patrick Day, vice president of sales.

“What we’re hearing is that if a restaurant was going to be cleaning the bathrooms every hour or every two hours, they’ll be increasing that once they reopen, so demand will go up for cleaning supplies, masks, gloves, and you’ll see more takeout and to-go materials (for dine-in service),” said Day. “If you got served on plates in a restaurant before, it may be that they go to a high-end one-time use product because they want the perception they’re being as sanitary as possible.”

Meanwhile, San Diego-based manufacturer Tomahawk Power has found success pivoting from largely selling its backpack sprayer for pest control and spraying avocado farms to marketing it for quick and efficient sanitation of large spaces.

Tomahawk’s sprayers utilize a pump and air, not unlike a leaf blower, to spray hospital-grade sanitizers in a large, broad area rapidly, explained co-owner Lawrence Nora.

“There’s an industrial supply store down the street that gets hundreds of pallets every day and they were spending hours spraying down the pallet before they stocked their store,” Nora said. “So we gave them one of these to speed up the process. I can tell you our salespeople get calls every day from restaurants, hardware stores, boutiques, larger retail stores.”

Officials at companies that sell the thermometers and provide other miscellaneous products and services businesses need to operate amid the COVID-19 pandemic said they have seen increased demand since the start of the outbreak, and interest has swelled further in recent weeks.

Thermometers to check temperatures of employees as they enter brick-and-mortar establishments have been in high demand for months, and supply chains remain stressed, said spokespeople from medical supply retailers.

“It first began with masks, then thermometers, eventually ventilators and now even physical therapy supplies have been affected,” said Vanessa Torres, digital marketing manager for the San Diego-based medical equipment retailer MFI Medical. “The increase in demand for all types of medical equipment and supplies has been exponential and affected various supply chains, unfortunately not just thermometers.”

A search for medical thermometers on the Home Depot website Friday afternoon turned up 18 results, and all 18 products were out of stock online and not for sale in stores.

Tim Drapeau, chief executive officer of CLIAwaived.com, a company that supplies medical and diagnostic supplies and also lab and diagnostic services, said the retail side of the business has seen increased demand for personal protective equipment, or PPE, from businesses outside its primary customer base of hospitals, clinics and other professional healthcare providers.

While most of the products CLIAwaived sells can only be sold to professional healthcare providers through a regulatory framework, it can and does sell equipment such as thermometers and gloves to businesses in other industries that are trying to reopen, Drapeau said.

“We’re trying to increase our inventory level to help the local community, Drapeau said. “So far we’ve been able to handle it, and we’re building it up.”

The e-commerce platform Ecwid has been seeing increased demand nationwide in recent weeks as small companies seek help getting their business online and facilitating curbside pickups, said David Novick, the company’s vice president of marketing.

“Ecwid saw the number of stores using order-pickup increase 8X (times) in the past month,” Novick said. “And for U.S. restaurants on the platform, the value of total sales on orders fulfilled via curbside pickup increased by 293 percent from March to April.”

Staffing firms may need to help fill positions as businesses reopen.

Phil Blair at the Manpower San Diego temporary employment agency said he is hearing from businesses with employees who don’t want to go back to work because they are making more on unemployment. Companies can incentivize workers to return to their jobs if they are earning more on unemployment than at their old jobs, he said.

“You need to raise your pay,” he said. “When you’re paying $13-$14 per hour, one dollar more is a lot of money. “We encourage them to pay $15.50. If you don’t, they may not come back.”

Rehired workers don’t necessarily have to return to their workplaces. Blair said one of the discoveries in this pandemic is that many jobs can be done at home. And because of continuing social distance and sanitation requirements, some companies and employees will prefer the remote-working option. He cited the 211 non-emergency information calling agency that was inundated with calls for assistance.

“We have 50 (temp) people over there working remotely and they got them trained up quickly,” he said.

There will be plenty of legal questions as businesses reopen. Dan Eaton, an attorney with Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek, said the best approach to myriad legal questions is to act in good faith, both on the employer’s and employee’s part.

And the best course for now is to follow local authorities’ instructions, since they usually incorporate state and national regulations and guidance.

When a workplace reopens, Eaton said employers should set the rules and leave them in place for the “indefinite future.”

Employers’ first duty is to maintain a safe and healthy workplace, he said. If workers contract Covid-19, they can apply for worker’s compensation.

The law also requires accommodating employees’ disabilities, whether physical or mental. But fear of contracting the disease is not an automatic basis for special treatment.

“Some folks might be able to get a doctor’s note that they shouldn’t be in the workplace,” Eaton said.

If workers disagree with their bosses, they should document their concerns in writing.

“Coronavirus is moving faster than the speed of law” he said. “It’s going to take years for all this play out, long after the virus situation has been resolved.”

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