**6. Protective and Preventive Layers for Office Buildings and Workplaces**

The current pandemic has shown the need for the built environment to be unfriendly towards severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) types of viruses [15]. A building's resiliency against the coronavirus will become a design consideration alongside productivity and aesthetics. To prevent COVID-19, especially when workers are returning to their respective workplaces, policymakers and building owners have to analyze, prepare, and implement various strategies for the safety of the workers. Based on the lessons learned and the vulnerabilities exposed during the pandemic stint of more than a year, a number of anti-COVID-19 considerations will be required for offices and workplaces for the safety of the workers. These requirements can be grouped under three broad headings: (1) regulatory environment, (2) engineering control environment, and (3) administrative and organization control environment, as shown in Table 2.


**Table 2.** Summary of office buildings and workplaces requirements to safeguard against COVID-19.


**Table 2.** *Cont.*

#### *6.1. Workplace Regulations*

The WHO's International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) is an international agreement, agreed upon by 196 countries, with a scope to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease. This regulation came into effect on 15 June 2007. The IHR addresses how different countries can take action against the spread of diseases such as COVID-19 or other public health issues. Therefore, in a sense, individual countries' COVID-19 health-protective guidelines must follow IHR regulations. Unfortunately, some countries were reported to have deviated from the IHR during COVID-19 [114].

Many international and national agencies, led by the WHO, have proactively issued COVID-19 safety guidelines for workplaces and are continually updating these guidelines as their understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus matures with time. The objectives of any of these agencies' guidelines are to provide national frameworks and organizational guidelines for the safe return of workers into workplaces. The authors of [136], reported that the COVID-19 guidelines of six countries during their initial outbreaks differed and reflected these nations' different healthcare strengths explicitly. The authors of [137] also pointed out the ad hocism of national and local COVID-19 guidelines across their 20-country study.

All regulations and guidelines, be they international or national, are fundamentally meant to prevent pandemic spread [138]. However, they may not address specific requirements for successful implementation in particular workplaces. For example, national or international guidelines may not specifically address how ventilation systems should work for the consideration of assembly line workers.

As different sectors of the economy reopen, countries need to develop sector-specific guidelines with collaboration between business chambers, workers' bodies, and government authorities so that benchmark standards can be implemented and followed by individual organizations [120]. Individual organizations should be ready to ensure employees' safety and security during COVID-19 [79,122]. Office managers should actively execute in-depth workplace analyses with expert input to develop the essential guidelines suitable for their workers. Constant updating of workplace guidelines according to the international and national guideline updates is required [78]. It must be noted that regulations cannot immediately bring about behavioral changes in workers [83]. Similarly, written policies or regulations alone cannot bring about the required behavioral changes [83]. Dennerlein et al., 2020 [139], therefore, indicated the necessity of multidimensional workplace regulatory frameworks that cover human factors and ergonomic principles, because, ultimately, employees must be cognizant of their responsibility towards their health.

#### *6.2. Engineering Control Measure Environment*

Efficient source control can play an important role in controlling infectious spreads in high-risk places [132], eliminating workers' risks of contracting pandemic diseases. Administrative actions that serve this purpose may include controlling office overcrowding, eliminating PPE doffing (such as masks, shields, etc.), and banning entry for visitors unwilling to maintain social distancing [140]. Source control may be especially difficult in sprawling office spaces, but surveillance systems may help by tracking and prohibiting possible protocol violations at their nascent stages. Bashir et al. (2020) [141] pointed out that even simple, low-cost end-to-end IoT architectures can aid in the surveillance of office environments to uphold standard operating procedures (SOP). With surveillance systems implemented, employers can ensure the strength of source control measures and quickly communicate about infection trends to inform employees of their actions [133].

Effective air cleaning, filtration, and ventilation systems are forms of engineering controls that can block virus entry pathways and maintain a healthy workplace environment [113]. The task of HVAC systems will be to prevent or eliminate airborne aerosols laden with micro respiratory droplets less than 5 microns in size from office environments. The epidemic task force of ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) suggested running office HVAC systems with at least minimum outdoor airflow rates to flush airborne viruses out of office spaces. HVACs should remain in operation until fresh air is replenished in every single employee's space within an office. Air cleaners and/or filters need to be utilized in conjunction with HVACs to prevent the recycling of unwanted aerosols back into the room [123]. ASHRAE also suggests using MERV (Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value) 13 or better rated air filters that can stop >95% of 0.30–1.0 micron-sized pathogens that are present in the air [56]. HVACs should also help maintain healthy workplace temperature and relative humidity (RH) that are unfriendly towards disease spread; in regard to this, research is still ongoing to establish the exact temperature and RH ranges that can best subdue the COVID-19 virus [142].

Health and sustainability should be at the core of any office building's architecture [15]. The COVID-19 pandemic made it starkly evident that designers and planners did not put enough importance on the issue of infectious disease control in building design. Before the pandemic, office buildings were developed with primary emphasis on productivity and aesthetics without sufficient consideration for infectious disease control features [143]. Therefore, office environments must become more versatile, infection resistant, and morally fulfilling for workers to achieve higher productivity [124]. Tall and crowded office buildings fitted with multiple fast-moving elevators are no longer looked upon proudly by employees due to their fear of virus infection. Instead, employees prefer lower-levelled office buildings with sprawling staircases [98]. Designers must also use building materials with a shorter half-life for the SARS-CoV-2 virus [131,144].

Open office layouts used to be much-touted for their productivity-enhancement capacity. However, their vulnerability to disease transmission was exposed during COVID-19, particularly by one case in Zurich where an entire team working in an open office became infected [87]. In India, workers wary of virus infection were reluctant to attend open-concept information technology call center offices. As such, designers must alter open plan layouts to make them more disease resilient [145]. Architectural innovations will be needed to create open office layouts that respect personal spaces and promote employee morale even during pandemics [146]. In addition, physical barriers made of plexiglass, polycarbonate, or tempered glass placed in refreshment rooms and meeting rooms can further reduce the possibility of close contact between employees [72].

Touch-free technologies can also mitigate the spread of virulent diseases in the office. Virus-laden surfaces, such as elevator keys, doorknobs, attendance registering keyboards, or even electrical switches, are prominent modes of disease transfer. Network-connected devices (Internet of Things, IoT networks) can help employees minimize physical contact with high-touch surfaces when passing through entry security systems, operating

elevators, accessing personal cabins, or using office equipment (computers, lights, fans, etc.) [130,147,148].

#### *6.3. Administrative and Organization Control Measure Environment*

Regardless of what sorts of management-enforced risk elimination and engineering controls are implemented in the workspace, they will be ineffective in keeping out COVID-19 unless efficient administrative follow-up is performed. Perhaps an organization's greatest asset against COVID-19 is motivated employees. Efficient administration can motivate employees to cooperate and maintain management-enacted guidelines and protocols for COVID-19 disease control. Without employee motivation, individual workers who defy protocols can undermine all management efforts in containing COVID-19 [149]. To this effect, the office administration's ability to involve workers in the safety planning and development of COVID-19 guidelines and protocols, such as workplace safety measures, cleaning and disinfection, emergency plan development, business continuity guidelines, and education and communication, will be immense. Administrators must not tire employees with rigorous COVID-19 protocol training but instead develop engaging and practical teaching sessions to prevent workers' inhibition against following the laid down protocols.

#### **7. Conclusions**

The current COVID-19 pandemic has brought different changes in our society. The continuance of the pandemic has forced humanity to think of erecting protective and preventive barriers that will allow people to return to everyday life. The rapid spread of COVID-19 forced the office and factory workers to leave their working premises and opt for work from home. However, offices and factories must function normally so as to maintain the economic health of any country. More resilient office and factory buildings with safety assurances are needed for workers to walk back to their offices and factories. The long COVID-19 stretch has exposed different workplace-related vulnerabilities that are required to be plugged in for workers to return to their workplaces. In this direction, this paper considered the vulnerabilities experienced in offices and working places under three major categories, the built environment, control environment, and regulatory environment, and then assessed methods to make workplaces conducive towards eliminating and controlling COVID-19 disease spread.

The COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that the built environment of offices was grossly incapable of controlling infectious disease spread as health and sustainability were not the fundamental part of the design aspects. Open space office layouts may provide cost efficiency as they enhance workers' productivity but can be an option during the COVID-19 pandemic. Office facilities and equipment must be equipped with more and more touch-free technologies. The control environment in offices needs to be reoriented, with the main focus on eliminating sources of infection and blocking the pathways of COVID-19 disease spread. Both engineering and administrative measures must work in a complementary mode to make the COVID-19 disease control environment fully effective in offices and factories. Regulations and guidelines enacted at the international or national level are essential in the context of the office environment to prevent pandemic spread. Agency regulations and country regulations are the important sources of updated researchbased understanding that can be used for developing operational guidelines to protect workplaces against COVID-19. Specific behavior standards should be developed and implemented for each work sector based on general guidelines established by the health authority. The concerted efforts of business chambers, trade unions, and government regulations should bring about behavioral changes required to protect workers from the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the study suffers from a few limitations. The study entirely depended on the literature published for a limited period, starting from the origin of COVID-19. We found that number of research studies focusing on vulnerabilities of office

buildings due to COVID-19 diseases were comparatively less in number than residential building vulnerabilities.

**Supplementary Materials:** The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/article/ 10.3390/su132413636/s1, Table S1: Preventive and Protective Measures Against COVID-19 From International Agencies.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, P.P., A.D. and O.C.; methodology, A.D. and O.C.; validation, O.C.; formal analysis, P.P. and A.D.; resources, P.P. and A.D.; data curation, O.C.; writing-original draft preparation, P.P. and A.D.; writing-review and editing, A.D. and O.C.; visualization, P.P.; project administration, P.P.; funding acquisition, P.P. and O.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by "The 100th Anniversary Chulalongkorn University Fund for Doctoral Scholarship".

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not Applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not Applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not Applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** This research was (partially) supported by the Ratchadapisek Sompoch Endowment Fund (2021), Chulalongkorn University (764002-ENV). We acknowledge the funding support provided by the Second Century Fund (C2F) from Chulalongkorn University awarded to Abhishek Dutta's postdoctoral fellowship.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


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