Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS), Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf (HZDR), Görlitz, Germany.
Department of Ecological Modelling, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany.
PLoS One. 2023 May 12;18(5):e0285601. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285601. eCollection 2023.
During pandemics like COVID-19, both the quality and quantity of services offered by businesses and organizations have been severely impacted. They often have applied a hybrid home office setup to overcome this problem, although in some situations, working from home lowers employee productivity. So, increasing the rate of presence in the office is frequently desired from the manager's standpoint. On the other hand, as the virus spreads through interpersonal contact, the risk of infection increases when workplace occupancy rises. Motivated by this trade-off, in this paper, we model this problem as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose a practical approach to find the trade-off solutions. We present a new probabilistic framework to compute the expected number of infected employees for a setting of the influential parameters, such as the incidence level in the neighborhood of the company, transmission rate of the virus, number of employees, rate of vaccination, testing frequency, and rate of contacts among the employees. The results show a wide range of trade-offs between the expected number of infections and productivity, for example, from 1 to 6 weekly infections in 100 employees and a productivity level of 65% to 85%. This depends on the configuration of influential parameters and the occupancy level. We implement the model and the algorithm and perform several experiments with different settings of the parameters. Moreover, we developed an online application based on the result in this paper which can be used as a recommender for the optimal rate of occupancy in companies/workplaces.
在 COVID-19 等大流行期间,企业和组织提供的服务的质量和数量都受到了严重影响。它们通常采用混合家庭办公设置来克服这个问题,尽管在某些情况下,在家工作会降低员工的生产力。因此,从经理的角度来看,经常希望增加员工在办公室的出勤率。另一方面,由于病毒通过人际接触传播,当工作场所的占有率上升时,感染的风险就会增加。出于这种权衡考虑,在本文中,我们将这个问题建模为一个双目标优化问题,并提出了一种实用的方法来找到权衡解决方案。我们提出了一个新的概率框架来计算在公司附近的感染水平、病毒传播率、员工人数、疫苗接种率、检测频率和员工之间接触率等影响参数设置下感染员工的预期数量。结果表明,感染人数和生产力之间存在广泛的权衡,例如,在 100 名员工中每周有 1 到 6 次感染,生产力水平为 65%到 85%。这取决于影响参数的配置和占用水平。我们实现了模型和算法,并针对参数的不同设置进行了多次实验。此外,我们根据本文的结果开发了一个在线应用程序,可作为公司/工作场所最佳占用率的推荐器。