| Hi there. We just got back from a reporting trip to Wuhan, ground zero of the coronavirus pandemic. As the rest of the world wonders what a return to work might look like after an outbreak, we visited a few of the first companies to actually try it. You can read about several of the Wuhan factories we toured in this week's Businessweek cover story, but we also stopped by another office that offers up a clearer parallel for Silicon Valley: the research and development center of Xiaomi Corp. Among Chinese vendors, Xiaomi is second only to Huawei Technologies Co. in terms of global smartphone shipments, and sees itself foremost as an internet company—one whose future relies on innovative ideas and cross-team collaborations. Now, even after reopening its R&D campus, new health restrictions have made it hard for staff to be in the same room, let alone brainstorm and solve problems in person, a challenge likely to be shared by American tech giants. When we went to Xiaomi's research facility on the outskirts of Wuhan in mid-April, employees were still only slowly coming back to the office after logging on from home since early February. At the sleek entrance to the office building—Xiaomi's second headquarters after Beijing—there was a temperature-monitoring station, as well as two security guards carrying hand-held infrared thermometers for individual checks. Once inside, workers' temperatures are also checked at their desks twice a day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. To be allowed back to work at all, the facility's roughly 2,000 workers had to overcome several hurdles. The QR health codes on their smartphones, China's system for monitoring virus risk, had to display green—the "safest" level. Returning employees also had to test negative for the virus and refrain from taking public transportation to work (though the transit requirement has more recently been relaxed). On top of that, only about half of staff are allowed to work from the office on any given day because of Xiaomi's rotation system to minimize social contact. Not surprisingly, the week of March 30 when the facility reopened, only about 100 people came in. When we visited a few weeks later the offices were still sparsely populated. After we made it inside the building we sat down with Liu Guojun, who runs Xiaomi's operations in Wuhan. As we settled into one of the facility's spacious conference rooms for the interview, Liu insisted that we not sit facing each other to adhere with the company's social distancing rules. Halfway through our interview, someone came in to take his temperature. "For those of us who've been stuck in Wuhan, we might be in a lax mood after this long, thinking we're safe now as the virus situation calms down," Liu said. "But loosening up prevention could end up causing big trouble." Before the outbreak, Xiaomi employees would have to book conference rooms like the one we sat in several days in advance. These days they mostly lie empty, and meetings happen online over apps like Zoom, ByteDance Ltd.'s Feishu or Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat. Though Xiaomi's sales have been resilient during the crisis, Liu said many workers were "depressed, anxious and nervous" during Wuhan's 76-day lockdown. That apprehension has a real impact. Liu said the company was planning to hire another 1,000 of people this year, but some applicants voiced concerns about working in the city. The lingering effects of the virus lockdown have also changed how people at Xiaomi work. "When in the office we can just grab a chair to discuss some simple issues, but now we need to call or message," Liu said. The new realities of office life are "making things more complicated," he said. They might not get simple again—in Wuhan or around the world—for a long time. —Sharon Chen and Claire Che | 
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