CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Thousands of people are currently working from home and have been since March. With the pandemic continuing, employees may still find themselves at home for the next few months.

To help shake things up, the Charlotte Knights are trying to redefine the term “home office.”

“I’m a sports agent, so I’m on the road a lot watching baseball,” says Drew Hardee, a North Carolina resident who has has been working from home. “But when Coronavirus hit, travel stopped. So I’ve been working from home, getting as much done as I can.”  

It’s a change in scenery from the usual office life that has come with its perks.

Hardee elaborates, “Getting to stay in my comfy clothes and stay at home with my wife, who was pregnant at the time.”

But, it’s been nine months since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to at home offices. Some employees now say they want a new routine.

“It’s nice to get a change of scenery and get something other than the four walls in my home office,” Hardee says.

The Charlotte Knights minor league baseball team responded by putting a home office right above home plate.

The team’s chief operating officer, Dan Rajkowski explains, “It actually came from a recommendation from our groundskeepers. We were talking one day, three or four of us, and he brought up the point that hotels are renting rooms to people to do their work just to get out of the house.”

The hotel’s new mixed-use setup gave the team an idea to convert the box seats at Truist Field into “Work From Home(Plate)” office suites.

Employees using the space can switch up their usual office routine. For the Charlotte Knights, it’s a unique way to handle the fastballs thrown the team’s way.

Rajkowski adds, “To lose our baseball season. We also were scheduled for the ACC tournament, and events not baseball related were canceled. So, we’re going 18 months without game day revenue. That’s the whole list of it. Keep the staff. Keep the lights on.”

The suites cost $95 a day and there are options to rent the suites a month at a time.

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