As things with Covid have “calmed down” the company I work for has asked us to return to the office a couple days a week. My department and the sales department are in the same section of the building in a very “open office” set-up. My desk is about 10-12 feet away from the closest sales person.
When I got there this morning I noticed it was uncommonly quiet and there were no sales people at their desks whatsoever, pretty unusual for a Monday morning. Considering how loud they are and how disruptive that can be in an open office, I wasn't unhappy with the situation, just curious.
After about two hours without seeing any other human beings I G-chatted one of the sales people I'm friendly with and jokingly asked if they were all on vacation. When he found out I was in the office he typed “yikes” and forwarded me an email that had gone out to the entire inside sales team directly from HR.
Email says that due to the large number of positive Covid cases experienced by the inside sales team they were all required to work from home this week and return next week only if they were able to provide a negative test. Not a single person in my department was copied on this communication, nor were any of us notified that we were potentially in close contact with positive cases.
I immediately sent the email to my supervisor and colleagues (without identifying the sales person who sent it my way) and went home. Fortunately my supervisor is equally livid that we were excluded from this important information.
Advice on how to escalate this issue outside the company would be greatly appreciated. Surely failure to notify my team of positive cases in the same office is in violation of some law.