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 are you going to start implementing these strategies, and whether they 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 is 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 to your team. It’s something known as “re-entry anxiety,” which you can learn more about in this article here. Essentially there are two forms:

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

2. Interacting with people. With social distancing for over a year, employees may need a bit of getting 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 do 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 is it going to be at random, 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 people together in one room.

3. Establish a follow-up process.
Keep track of how your plan is working and you can do this 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?

• And so on…

By following up with 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 it in the long run.

You can watch Rob Daniels discuss this topic here on our YouTube Channel.

Written with references from:
BDC

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