guest column:Emmanuel Zvada
OVER the past few months, millions of employees worldwide have been working remotely to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Now that restrictions are easing in many countries, many organisations are now making plans to bring their workforce back to the office.
The good question to interrogate is, after so many months working remotely, how do you shift your business back to the office while keeping employees safe and informed?
In this new post-COVID-19 era, you will need to make many considerations about how to ensure your employees and customers are safe, but also about how to continue operating your business in the most effective way possible that is profitable.
If you want to keep your workplace safe and productive in upcoming months, now is the time to implement a strategy that will help your decision-makers tap into the collective wisdom of your workforce before they come back to work on full swing.
Bringing your workforce back to the office is no small task especially when you were not fully in touch with them during this pandemic. The sooner you accept the new normal and start preparing for it, the better.
Reassess your business strategy The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses and individuals to re-evaluate their priorities. Organisations should take a take a look at what challenges they are facing, their restrictions etc. The reason for checking is that you might need to make some changes in the workspace to allow for workstations to be farther apart.
This is the time to bring together your executive team and use those lessons learnt during the pandemic to reconfigure your business and operating models for a new reality.
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As we shift from response to recovery, the key for senior leaders is to make strategic decisions that will lead them to a renewed future state.
This crisis has created an opportunity for organisations to reset some of their goals and ambitions as they recover from the COVID-19 crisis.
Realign your cost structure to increase productivity The growth of an organisation depends not only on how much it generates with its products or services, but also how much it spends.
A company can sell a lot and please its customers, but if its costs exceed (or are too close) to the amounts collected, it will not grow.
No company can totally avoid the impact of increasing costs but they can manage them. Look across the whole organisation and differentiate the strategically-critical “good costs” from the non-essential “bad costs”.
If an industry is facing massive disruption and change, marginal efficiency savings can no longer guarantee survival and success.
The key priority in strategic cost reduction is targeting resources where they can earn the best return, rather than just cutting costs in itself.
Reflect on present working practices and adjust As the nature of the work environment continues to change, new trends have emerged hence there is need for organisations to reflect on present working practices and adjust.
It’s a fact that being away from the office has allowed employers to reassess some of the working practices they used to have. Before returning to the office, it’s crucial to decide which ones are well-suited to your organisation and desired by your workers as many employers have introduced flexible working schemes to try to meet the demand from the workforce.
Involve and support your people When your employee is ready to return to work, you should make their return as smooth and stress-free as possible by conducting a return to work interview, making necessary workplace adjustments and ensuring that you are following any standards related to the pandemic.
You should also make sure to ask your employees how they feel about going back. This will allow you to scope out your workforce’s sentiment regarding returning to the office, including any potential anxiety, and will help you build trust between management and employees.
It is, and will continue to be, an unsettling time, and your employees should feel confident and safe going back to the office. Consider how your organisation can support your workers’ physical and mental health, and offer your workforce a robust support system if you want them to be at work.
Have a flexible return to work plan Organisations should also be careful not to conflate flexible working and home working — remote or home working is just one form of flexible working, of which there are many and the type of home working we have been experiencing recently is not the usual experience.
The COVID-19 lockdown has forced all businesses to reassess almost every aspect of how they work. Each company’s return to work plan must be unique, and different plans may be required based on location, local requirements and function. Key factors to consider include the location of the workplace, the number of employees working in one location, the ability to ensure proper social distancing within the workplace and employee reliance on public transportation. It is also critical to design a return to work plan that is sufficiently flexible to adapt to evolving. Build an agile workforce Agility, in the simplest term, is the ability to adapt to change or respond to an outer stimulus in a speedy yet effective manner.
Business leaders need to offer flexible working processes, enabling employees to work from home or during non-office hours. Having a workforce that can rapidly respond to market changes will be a competitive advantage. Yes, an organisation is agile only when its workforce is agile. Not only leaders and top managers need to exhibit agility but also the employees at all levels of hierarchy. And this is possible only when people feel empowered; develop multiple skill-sets; show willingness to take challenges; and experiment and innovate. In short, they need to be agile.
Implement workplace control for the new normal Companies first need to consider the structure in which a return-to-work plan will be created. That structure will need to include identifying stakeholders; outlining and defining critical information requirements and creating detailed execution checklists for individual business units. If your workplace has been closed for a period for reasons related to COVID-19, make a plan for when work resumes that takes account of health and safety. Organisations must increase ventilation rates in the workplace ,establish policies to limit the number of employees and visitors in the workplace at any given time; reconfigure office spaces to maintain proper social distancing by setting up barriers, such as partitions, between workspaces; and provide personal protective equipment (e.g, masks, gloves and protective eye wear) .
Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath will be one of the biggest business challenges of our time .As companies and organisations begin to bring their employees back into the workplace, leaders have a critical role to play in not only communicating to their teams that “things are different,” but also helping their teams prepare for the experience of coming back to a dramatically transformed work environment.
