This sounds like something made up, but it's apparently true - or at least it was. I just hadn't heard of it before. 

According to several articles I was able to find, including one from business publication Bloomberg, during the height of the pandemic, BBC was requiring employees who had to come to the office to wear electronic buzzers that would go off whenever they got too close to a co-worker. I have no idea if this is still going on, but it stayed in place for at least a year. 

How would you react to something like this? I can't imagine the affected workers were terribly happy to hear these things going off as they moved around their office and I can only hope they couldn't be heard on air. My bet is that after a while, they started ignoring them or not wearing them at all. But what a weird atmosphere that must have been. 

From Jan. 2021:

BBC Had Staff Wear Electronic Buzzers to Curb Spread of Virus