There's a lot to think about if you're a company that will have your employees back full-time or partly working in the office after the pandemic.

You have to think about how your employees feel, what safety measures you're going to have in place, when you are going to start implementing these strategies, and whether they are going to work.That's why it's important to have a "Back-to-Work Plan" for your office.Below we have provided you with three tips on how to do that.

1. Involve your team.

It's important when you are creating a back-to-work plan for your office that you involve input from your employees. Aside from implementing guidelines established by the Ontario Government last June, your employees may be able to provide you with some ideas to include in your plan that are more specific to your place of business.During this stage, you can also assess the readiness of your team. If your employees have been working from home since the start of the pandemic, heading back to the office can actually cause some added stress. This is something known as "re-entry anxiety," which you can learn more about in this article. Essentially there are two forms:

-Concerns about safety. Employees may be worried about unknowingly contracting COVID-19 and spreading it.

-Interacting with people. After social distancing for over a year, employees may need some time to get used to interacting with people in the office.

Knowing this about your employees can help you gauge how you create your back-to-work plan. Do you slowly implement it in stages? Do you allow employees the flexibility to work from home and in the office?

2. Create a timeline and plan.

Once you have established how you are going to get your team back into the office and what measures you are going to implement to stay safe, create a timeline and plan.For example, if you are giving your employees the flexibility to work from home and in the office, how are you going to do that? Are you going to do it by department, ensuring people in one department are present in the office on the same day? Or will it be more flexible, where employees have more leeway in choosing what days they can be at home and in the office?When people are in the office, how are you going to increase sanitization and maintain social distancing? For example, you could stagger breaks and the lunch hour to limit the number of people together in one room.

3. Establish a follow-up process.

Keep track of how your plan is working by having regular meetings with your employees.

-Do your employees feel safe enough with the current sanitization and social distancing measures?

-If your employees are in the office a couple of days a week, do they feel like they want to come back full-time or remain mostly at home?

-Is it too complicated to have some people working at home and others working in the office, especially if they are in the same department?

By following up on the plans that you have created, you can tweak them along the way as you find out what works and what doesn't, in order to maximize effectiveness in the long run.You can watch Rob Daniels discuss this topic on our YouTube Channel here.Written with references from: BDCGuhuza is created in partnership with TorontoJobs.ca.Guhuza is the new way of recruitment. It is an innovative Canadian platform that goes beyond the features of a traditional job board. It uses breakthrough technology to instantly match employers and job seekers for the ultimate hiring experience.Our advanced technology matches job seekers' profiles with jobs on our site and ranks them for employers based on the skills required for the position. Once a match has been made, live interviews can be conducted right through our platform.

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