Vodafone is sending its 1,200 Auckland workers home for a day to practice its pandemic plan in case Covid-19 becomes more widespread.
Overseas, Google has asked all employees in North America to work remotely. Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook are also encouraging workers to stay at home in areas hit by the virus.
Vodafone HR boss Katie Williams told Checkpoint the company already has flexible work locations, but it will be a large-scale simulation of a potential worst-case scenario should Covid-19 shut offices down.
"We are going to lock down our entire Auckland office, five floors, and ask all of our people in the Auckland office to work from home," she said.
"Our test is to see whether our people can still connect into our systems and still be fully productive, while working from their houses.
"We're really lucky in that we have had flexible working policies and tools in place for many years, so it's less of a difference for us than it may be for other companies who are less enabled to be mobile.
"But the key thing that it's required us to do is to communicate really clearly with our teams, not only in terms of what we're doing, why we're doing it, but also to be really clear this is just a test. We do not have coronavirus in our organisation.
"We are nationwide so we have big offices in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch and then a number of other offices around the country."
Williams said if they can prove the concept in Auckland, Vodafone will be confident it can work remotely across the country in an emergency event.
She said she is seeing alternative forms of greeting throughout the building, like elbow tapping.
"We've put a lot of hand sanitizer around the organisation and we've got 'Keep calm and wash your hands' signs through our bathrooms."
Busy parts of the building are being sterilised every night, she said.
"Every 24 hours we are doing a sterilisation of our organisation, including all our hot disk surfaces but with a particular focus on high traffic areas - things like door handles, lift buttons, the entry pads to get into the building."
Retail stores have to stay open, she said, but cleaning and sterilising has been increased there.
"We do have a couple of people who have asked to work from home for 14 days... Not because they've been in contact with people with coronavirus but because they've been in contact with people who have been in close contact.
"At the moment for Vodafone, the closest our people have come to coronavirus is two degrees of separation. We are being very conservative, but we are asking those people to self-quarantine for 14 days to make sure."
