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Two years in, the pandemic is permanently reshaping the traditional workspace concept
THE OFFICE, THEN & NOW with the entire world in a tailspin caused by the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, Megan Brownell found herself facing a fairly inconceivable set of circumstances. Brownell—vice president of communications for Banner Health Foundation, the philanthropic, fund-raising arm of Banner Health— got word that her company’s midtown Phoenix offices were shutting down. N E A R LY 2 0 2 0 ,
“It’s kind of marked in my memory that it was the Friday before St. Patrick’s Day, when we were asked, sort of casually, to tell our teams to take their laptops home that weekend because, as they said, they weren’t sure what the next week or couple of weeks were going to look like,” Brownell recalls. “No big, huge announcement, but just a quiet suggestion to tell our teams to maybe take their stuff home, just in case.”
STORY BRUC E FA R R PHOTOGRAPHY MARK LIPCZYNSKI