Preparation for returning to the workplace

With some countries around the world beginning to lift lockdown restrictions, conversations across the business world are starting to turn to the question of “How do we safely and seamlessly prepare for returning to the office after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted?”.

Unsurprisingly, after everything companies and their employees have done to successfully adapt their operations and working practices to social distancing rules over recent weeks, immediately returning to old ways will likely neither be sensible or practicable. With safety being the key priority for a reintroduction to office life, businesses will need to plan thoroughly for the transition period ahead.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach and, of course, we all need to be mindful of the latest government health advisories. So, with those important considerations in mind, from an operational perspective, here are some considerations to help your staff transition successfully back to an office environment when it’s appropriate to do so once social distancing measures are relaxed.

Implement a dynamic return to office strategy

While business leaders need to monitor government guidelines that might prescribe how to govern workplace social distancing, bringing your entire workforce back to the office at the same time could be challenging. So, one way to mitigate the difficulties of navigating a “new normal” on a large scale is to stagger the return to the office – having some teams come back a few days or weeks before others.

Similarly, depending on the size of your organisation and density of office space, maintaining working from home arrangements across teams on an alternating basis could also make it easier to implement safe social distancing rules. This essentially involves select teams working remotely while others work in-house on any given day.

An alternating approach to remote working might also reduce the risks of staff feeling pressured or overwhelmed by an immediate return to the office five-days-a-week. After all, some families might still be juggling temporary disruptions to childcare arrangements and it is likely that public transport systems will become crowded again. So, a transitionary period will help everyone re-adjust to the new office-based work reality, post-pandemic.

Finally, if you have developed your technology infrastructure to facilitate remote work, you would do well to continue to leverage these new capabilities as, in all probability, a mix of remote and at-office work will be needed for some time.

Prioritise continuous communication

Preparing for returning to the workplace requires continuous communication. Where, how and when people work in a shared office environment will likely need to change in order to ensure the health and safety of employees. These changes could include new rules around the numbers of people entering kitchens, meeting rooms, distancing between workstations, desk cleaning regimes and best practices for hand hygiene and using facilities, as examples.

Right from the start, it’s important to ensure these new workplace requirements are clearly and regularly communicated to all staff so there is no confusion or breakdown in procedures.

Regular email updates, updates on the company’s intranet and social channels, as well as frequent town hall meetings (online or in a smaller setting) could be key elements of an effective communication approach.

As part of your communication strategy – and especially within larger companies – it could be beneficial to appoint “lead” staff members within teams to help ensure rules are properly understood, enforced and that there is a point of contact for staff who wish to ask questions or raise concerns.

Paul: Hello, I'm Paul McDonald, Senior Executive Director with the staffing firm, Robert Half. The world is experiencing unprecedented social, economic and business disruption as the result of the COVID pandemic and the workplace is no exception. Almost every way companies operate and the individuals work has dramatically changed and will continue to evolve over the coming weeks, months and even years. Together with my special guest, internationally renowned statistician and well-being expert Nick marks we're going to explore some positive, practical suggestions for making the transition back to office based work and take an early look at what the future of work might look like post COVID-19. Our goal is to uncover strategies to help both individuals and companies determine what can be learned from this experience and what they need to do now to be successful. Nick as the lockdown and social distancing guidelines start to be lifted and people returning to office based work, let's explore what the new reality of work is going to look like. Do you have some suggestions you know I'm people dealing with fear and respecting worker choice as they head into the office or be invited into the office? Nic: Yeah, it's going to be difficult and for some people quite challenging as there anxiety levels are very high and you know when people are frightened they sort of, part of their reaction is to freeze, so they're not gonna be good at collaborating. They're going to be perhaps nervous of other people, people that have have been trusted colleagues will suddenly feel like, "Oh my, might they have the virus?" And so I think there's going to be a very difficult negotiation. Some people who were more anxious are going to really struggle. Some who are more confident perhaps won't or people who have had it will feel will feel sort of invincible, so there's going to be a big variety of experience as people come back and try to keep a distance and try and collaborate. So it will be, you'll need to judge on an individual basis on individual office location basis and also individual people basis about how it's going to work. Paul: And the communication factor, you know between management or supervisor and employee is just increasing as we look at this remote workforce and what we've been thrown into in this COVID-19 crisis. What is some advice that you would have for managers on communication with their teams? Nic: So I think that we obviously need to do more and we also need to be checking in whether it's working for people. Some people want more, a little chat, and some people want to be left alone sometimes because they've got very pressured windows they can work in because of childcare or elder care whatever else is going on for them. So it's finding tailored solutions for individuals, it's talking to the whole team you know perhaps daily at the moment, but you do have to watch out for too many people on a Zoom or Teams call you know. You can't really open up if there's too many people. So my rule of thumb is only have four people on a call if you want to be creative or collaborative, no more than that. If you want to have more than that then you're basically what I call time sharing, where you're going around and asking individual people to share one at a time. And then that needs facilitating by the manager you can't expect the quiet people to speak unless you call on them, so you really need to be drawing them into it. Again it's just good management but like amplified. Paul: Looking at some of the new skills that are needed by the employee or the worker in addition to the management team we talk about soft skills regularly and the need for soft skills to be effective in today's workforce. When you look at it soft skills as it relates to you know this new world order of technology, video conferencing, what are some thoughts that you would have on the importance of soft skills in this new world of remote work? Nic: I think even more and it's sort of ironic isn't it really that data and tech becomes more and more front and foremost. I think people skills become more, you know we need both of those things: people skills and tech skills. And the remote working accentuates it even more...With remote you've got to be much more intentional, much more deliberate. Those accidental collisions that happened where you could sort of manage by walking around and just checking on people, you can't do that anymore. So you've really got to intentionally reach out, you've got to diarise. Talk to people, one-to-one talks because you're just going to, you're not going to pick them up in the cracks between work at the water cooler or just when you see someone's chill. You're going to have to do that more deliberately. So there is a lot, there's going to be more pressure on that, more more structure to that. Paul: Let's take a look at further out on the horizon, Nic, and you know what's COVID's legacy going to be? You know what's the new reality? What's the new normal going to look like in the workplace and what can managers and workers be doing now to prepare for that? Nic: Well I think that the very fact that employee well-being, employee mental health is front and foreground I think is good because it's always been a loss of productivity, there's always been a loss of creativity, a loss of collaboration. In fact from our estimates you know if you invest in an employee well-being program you'll get five times return on investment in any year in terms of increased creativity, innovation, productivity, collaboration. So I think what it's going to do is it's going to make that more front-and-center and people are going to take more notes and in my opinion that's a good thing. It's going to be a bumpy ride. And I think we're going to be here for quite a while. And everything's changing. Markets are changing, you know customers are changing, supply chains are changing, so what do we need to do? I think the main thing is we need to really have an ear on the ground, we really need to listen. Listen well to our customers, listen well to our employees, listen well to our suppliers. I'd even suggest you know you get a chief listening officer. You know someone that's going to really help coordinate that and do that in a great way in your organization's to take that forward. And if you listen and you react then you can be what we call agile and you can respond to that and this might be opportunities for smaller companies because they typically are more agile and more able to respond than larger ones. And large ones are more difficult to still though they probably have more access to capital so they might ride it out better. But the world is not going to be the same. That's for sure. This is a huge global shock. We need to be more tech savvy. I think it even more increases the need for people skills and that actually that, you know the two sets of skills of people and tech are going to be the growing managerial skills that we need and the growing skills are all employees need to be able to do is to use both of those things. So you know the more that we do remote working, the more empathy we have to have, the more we have to understand differences between people and the different circumstances. So it's an interesting world. Paul: You have companies that are willing to have employees work remotely. It brings down some geographic barriers that historically have been in place when recruiting individuals. So it's going to be interesting obtaining talent, hiring talent remotely, but it opens up new frontiers for employers to go after workers. Nic: Yeah, I think you're entirely right. We've also seen, you know, in some ways that the future comes sooner than we expected. You know, we had the gig economy going on and quite a lot of people self-selecting into being freelance or doing piecemeal work. And obviously there's some times that they're forced into but sometimes people are choosing and I think that a lot of people will quite like working at home and they may choose to go freelance and they may choose to do work in different ways, different rhythms. Maybe three, four day weeks will become more popular. It's going to be a huge, huge shake-up and that's before we even think about other things which we know are coming as long-term trends like AI and other things. So there's a multitude of things coming. And what I do think is that there's a possibility that people will be freer, possibility that there'd be able to work in ways they more want to. And if employers can go with that they will actually get more out of people because when people choose how they want to work they work better. So there are possibilities of sunshine after the rain. Paul: We hope today's insights proved interesting and help provide an early look at what COVID-19's legacy could be when it comes to where and how we work, both now and in the future. Kudos and special thanks to Nic Marks for joining me from London today for this discussion which we hoped has provided some positive practical suggestions on how we can all continue to adapt and manage our way through this turbulent time. Please don't hesitate to contact us here at Robert Half if you have questions or would like additional advice or support. In the interim, please stay safe and well. Bye for now

Be people focused

It’s important to recognise that workforces have had to endure a lot of change in a relatively short space of time, which can be incredibly unsettling. On top of this, working for a few weeks in isolation without the usual physical interactions with team members could be potentially detrimental to employee engagement and mental wellbeing.

When preparing for a return to the workplace, companies would do well to prioritise rebuilding staff morale and boosting motivation in the first few weeks of resuming office life. Managing people with great sensitivity and maintaining positivity throughout will be crucial. To help instil a sense of normalcy and engagement, encourage maximum collaboration between individuals (in accordance with social distancing rules), and make sure teams can feel part of company goals and opportunities through regular meetings and communications.

Continuing to invest in technology and offering flexibility will also be important to ensure people can continue to work remotely or on site, either in accordance with their own wishes or as part of your staggered return-to-office plan.

Hear and encourage feedback

Whether on a company-wide basis or a team-by-team approach, schedule regular check-ins to hear your employees’ questions and concerns.

At all times during this period, maintaining two-way communication with your workers will be essential for keeping up moral and ensuring clarity. For example, if some employees aren’t comfortable with coming to the office every day, these individuals should have plenty of opportunities to have their concerns heard and dealt with promptly, respectfully and fairly.

Regular team or company catch ups could also be a great opportunity to hear new suggestions for what could be improved as we all continue to work and learn our shared, post-COVID “new reality”.

Get staffing right

The impact of COVID-19 on jobs has been widespread and it has affected different companies in different ways – some to a greater degree than others. However the pandemic has impacted your business, it’s essential to ensure that your core teams aren’t left struggling under pressure, or even missing out on new business or development opportunities due to a lack of training or resources.

As workloads begin (or continue) to spike or fluctuate, consider using a mix of permanent and temporary workers to quickly fill skills gaps – enabling your business to maintain continuity and capitalise on growth opportunities.

As part of your post-COVID-19 staffing strategy, when preparing for returning to the workplace, it’ll also be necessary to ensure employees who experience changes to their role functions have all the training, support and tools they need to perform their job well.

Address and clarify company policies around illness

To ensure both peace of mind as well as health and safety considerations, emphasise how essential it is for staff to stay home when feeling unwell to avoid the risk of spreading seasonal illnesses around the office.

Because of COVID-19, all companies should be aware of the potential for official workplace health and safety guidelines to be changed and refined over time. For this reason, it will be important to keep up-to-date and continue to communicate with the workforce to encourage compliance and help to develop safer and healthier working practices.

The recent pace of change and unpredictability has called for a lot of careful planning by companies and a high level of adaptability by everyone in the workforce. For this reason, as we transition from one “new normal” to another, it will be important to think strategically and methodically about how we can successfully find our way back to a more recognisable work environment.

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