What do you do for back up support in the event your office/workplace manager(s) are out sick? I am looking to set up some sort of vendor or plan for my team so that if they are out sick for a week, I can have coverage and not try to manage day to day in offices when I am remote + I travel A LOT and not always available.

Your managers should honestly be able to write this out for you as they know who around them knows the most and can take on the most

We have one office team member in each location, so looking to see if there are vendors or contract type work that might be able to be on call to fill void. We are opting to not put it on people outside of the workplace team as it has caused a lot of friction and takes them away from their day to day.

There are many options out there! I think it depends on the scope of work, ie drilling down to a minimum set of duties to keep the train on the tracks. For your office manager, is this primarily facilities-focused, people experience-focused, other set of weekly “to-do’s”. I think in order to get the best advice one would need to know how things are structured and/or what “workplace” covers. As you know, this includes the people team in some orgs and in other orgs it is 100% operations/facilities and vendor management. If the latter, I can send you some names based on the regions by priority. If the former, I think some additional creativity around internal assist with crossover functions is in order. Just my $0.02, though!