Ingeniux Seattle Office Opening August 31st

As you know, we re-opened the Walla Walla office on June 8^th, following Walla Walla County certification for Phase 2.  Attendance in the Walla Walla office since re-opening has been very light; about 20% of the Walla Walla-based employees are coming into the office on any given day.  The attendance numbers reflect a range of personal circumstance and considerations – from child care, to health concerns, to comfort level working in the office.  Current working conditions in the Walla Walla office allow for ample social distancing.  To our knowledge we’ve had no confirmed cases of COVID-19 amongst our Walla Walla-based staff.

For the Seattle office, we’ve been closely monitoring key indicators of COVID-19 activity in King County to determine a suitable time to re-open the Seattle office.  King County entered Phase 2 on June 19, which might have been a logical time to re-open the Seattle office were it not for a spike in reported cases starting the next week.  At that point we decided to continue taking a wait and see approach.  The number of confirmed cases in King County continued to grow at a linear rate through July, which was reflective of a broader trend in Washington State, resulting in the State officially pausing progression through the stages and the Governor’s office issuing new guidelines and requirements for public health practices.

Since issuing new requirements and guidelines to deal with the surge in COVID-19 cases, the growth of confirmed cases in Washington State peaked in late July and has been on a downward trend since.

Currently, case rates for King County and Walla Walla county for the last week are:

King County:  49 cases per 100,000 residents

Walla Walla County:  168 cases per 100,000 residents

Our thinking on re-opening the Seattle office has been guided by the notion that at some point we will reach an inflection point in number of new cases and overall community confidence in returning to work.  It’s clear (to me at least) that we are not going to see that inflection point any time soon.  Instead, we’re likely going to continue with the current situation of the virus waxing and waning through the population at least through early 2021 and possibly into late 2021.  In that scenario, some people will feel comfortable returning to work and some people, for a variety of considerations, will continue to work remotely.

So we’re going to officially re-open the Seattle office for those who want to come in as of Monday, August 31.  In the last two months we have been prototyping the Seattle office opening with a few essential workers in the Support Group.  All of the office spaces in Seattle provide a minimum of six feet distancing and with the small number of people coming into the office we have very little interaction and lots of social distancing.

If you’d like to return to working in the Seattle office, please let you manager know in the coming week so we can plan accordingly.  In the meantime, we’ll be sending a detailed communication to everyone in the Seattle office about office protocols and procedures designed to keep people safe and healthy. 

I want to once again let everyone know that regardless of office openings, members of the Seattle and Walla Walla offices have the option of continuing to work remotely.  We are very fortunate that we can operate our business successfully with people working remotely.  We are also very fortunate that over the last three years we’ve built a good infrastructure for doing this.  Many of you will want to, or need to, continue working remotely for a variety of reasons.  We fully understand and support that.