So, the world is being brave, and the front-liners are keeping us safe. It has been 8 months since the Pandemic hit us and now, we have almost come to terms with it. With this, comes the opportunity to restart work at the earliest but without a proper understanding of how to make this transition safe, we could be risking having another lockdown. We have come up with the 4 Ps of re-opening workspaces amidst Covid-19 to help your company stay resilient and healthy during these testing times and how HR play a vital role in the whole process.
Precautions
Wisdom suggests that prevention is better than cure, and that couldn’t be truer in the case of a deadly pandemic. Due to the viral nature of the disease, there are a lot of fears in the minds of people and it is only natural that some of your employees may not be comfortable joining the work environment yet. However, communicating a clear policy around COVID-19 and steps to mitigate the risk of transmission can give your team the confidence to bring their best spirits back. Let’s see what these measures could look like:
- Keep up with the rules: Outline the various National, State, municipal and even building/community level guidelines and ensure that employees have reviewed them. A mandatory learning module or a written consent of understanding can further legitimize the new policies in the minds of the employees. The individual responsibilities and rights should be defined during these activities.
- Communicate everything: Lack of transparency is what led to this pandemic and thus transparency shall help eradicate it. Inform employees about the safety measures being taken by the organization and why certain decisions are taken. A transparent organization will give its employees the confidence to report any issues and help prevent any lapses or failure to report due to peer pressure.
Preference
Since you require the support of every individual, democratizing the formation of new policies will help ensure organization wide compliance. It has often been observed that people try to find a way around cultural changes enforced on their teams. Rather, a more decentralized, solution-oriented and bottom-up approach will help make the new policies sustainable. It creates a situation where stakeholders from different teams with different needs have their own way of dealing with the issue. The focus must be on the why and not the how.
- Discuss with managers about their preferences for the date & time of return and what would be the optimal attendance level for their team. While some may need to come back to work earlier, others may want to permanently work-from-home. Identifying team preferences and expectations will enable us to stagger the entry process. This will perhaps be the most crucial step while balancing guidelines with operational needs.
- Balance personal interests of all stakeholders. Employees may have religious, cultural, personal or medical reasons for not being able to comply with rules set by the company. Knowing the number of employees with such concerns and understanding their willingness to compromise for sake of others will play a crucial role in formulating the guidelines and the severity of their application. Deploy surveys and workshops to generate opinions and ideas while also inviting people to share their concerns. Always remember, this is a team effort and even one lapse could be fatal for the whole organization.
- Test policies in smaller pockets before extending them to other teams. Analysis of employees’ behaviour and productivity can help HR teams leverage agile techniques to rapidly test multiple policies and filter out the least effective ones.
Protocols
Now that we have educated our employees and brainstormed their preferences, we must now focus on implementing policies. While it is true that organizations are bound to develop unique policies, here are a few things that must be incorporated across the spectrum:
- Establish a team or point-of-contact dedicated to dealing with pandemic related concerns.
- Categorize issues based on escalation level and outline protocols for each category. Enforce strict timelines for responding and resolving each issue.
- One common feature of everybody’s protocol would be the response for three base cases: when an employee is positive, negative or has come in contact with someone who is positive. The process should be clearly defined to support the employee end-to-end during this process. Employees must be able to privately declare their latest status without any fear of judgement, while the same information, along with ideal next steps but barring the personal information of the vector, must also be transmitted to every other employee.
- Most companies will have to work with a fraction of attendance (roughly 30-60%) that their facility is capable of handling. New working schedules, team structures and collaboration support systems will have to be established to ensure the highest possible productivity.
Positivity
Finally, we cannot emphasize of this P enough. Positivity will help your employees retain their camaraderie and put forward a team effort when it is required the most.
- Positivity about the new future – while a lot of functions are being disrupted, we must not let it bother us but look at this as an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage for the future. Since all companies are facing these issues, the unknown future can bring sustainable prosperity and health if we are able to view the reality objectively and prepare ourselves.
- Positive leadership – A positive leadership is critical to the success of going back to office. It can wear off on the employees and change the perspective of how problems are seen and dealt with. Since the company will need to change a lot of the processes and cultural characteristics, adoption of new technologies and ideas will require the support of senior management.
We hope this guide is able to help your team to make a smooth come-back and take a lead on setting new standards in the post-covid world. The times may be tough, but not tougher than our resolve to grow and help create value for others. As long as we stay united, transparent and positive, we shall turn this challenge into an opportunity to create organizations that can sustainably excel in the information age. We recognize the broadness of the problems that may be faced by organizations and would like to help you build customized and tech-driven solutions to tackle them. Please let us know what challenges your teams are facing and what you’d like us to discuss next. You could also reach us to get your current processes audited by seasoned HR professionals to find tailor-made solutions to real business problems. Stay tuned to this space for more exciting ways to build the industry leading organizations of tomorrow.
If you want to assess your organization’s readiness to deal with the current situation and explore best possible options in your organization’s context, you may write to info@moccasin-wolverine-718846.hostingersite.com
