In recent weeks, many business leaders have talked with me about remote work and their plans for reopening their workplaces, and many are evaluating reopening their offices and bringing employees back from remote work arrangements—many organizations have already done so.
In good times or bad, any strategic decision starts out by defining objectives, and the decision about reopening is no different. Once the objective is defined, a plan can be created to accomplish that objective, guide communication, drive operations, and measure results. As your business makes its plans, what overarching objective has it defined?
Obviously, some businesses desperately need employees to be physically present in order to operate, such as restaurants and other direct customer-facing essential operations. But many other organizations do not need the daily physical presence of the employees in the office to get the job done. Many leaders were initially uncomfortable with the remote work arrangement, assuming that productivity would wane; but they have been pleasantly surprised by increases in productivity.
If leadership continues to be doubtful about employee productivity, it should evaluate the reasons behind the distrust. Is your hiring process suspect? Have leaders not clearly identified expectations and appropriate measures? Are there no tools in place to measure results? We can’t assume that just because an employee is staying off of social media and has the right number of keystrokes per hour that he or she is being productive. Rather, we should be measuring employee output and results. Simply stated, are they getting the job done?
If your objective in bringing employees back to the office is to improve productivity, do you have data that shows productivity decreased during the work from home environment? If not, what’s the rush? If so, what plan can you put in place to improve productivity, and is coming back to the office an inherent part of that? How will you communicate clearly and consistently related to this objective for reopening? How will you measure results?
The same advice applies to other aspects around work such as the resumption of employee travel, employee face to face meetings, etc.
In a webinar with hundreds of HR leaders this week, attendees were asked about employee productivity in recent weeks during the work from home arrangement. More than 80% indicated that productivity has been significantly (and surprisingly) higher in recent weeks during the work-from-home experience. If your organization saw a decrease in productivity, what did your cause analysis uncover?
If employee surveys indicate that employees feel significant negative impact related to lack of typical socialization provided by working in the office, will that become your objective (or one of them)? How will you balance that need against the risk of spreading Covid 19? Will employees come to the office once a week at 50% attendance? What plans will you put in place for mitigating risk? What about employees who are reticent to return because of the risk? Fair and legally defensible plans need to be in place.
As I attended an online TX SHRM event yesterday, the discussion clearly underlined the reality that the corona virus is still out there. We have flattened the curve, but the health risk is still there. An HR expert in the webinar asked, “What’s the rush in returning to the office?” His organization is keeping employees working from home through the summer. Late in the summer they will re-evaluate. Leaders in this organization believe that clear decisions made for a set period of time allow more certainty for employees, and allow them to plan ahead.
Interestingly, when asked about regrets related to employer responses to the pandemic, every HR leader I have talked with in recent weeks stated that if there was one thing they would have done differently, it would have been to make plans more concrete and long-term. They believe it was not fair to their employees to leave things up in the air with new decisions every week or so. How could their employees adequately plan? These leaders believe they should have shut down when required and let the employees know they would be working from home until a much later date. The employers believed it was ineffective to keep employees in limbo by reevaluating about reopening every one-to-two weeks, since it kept employees from being able to plan ahead. In fact, some employers mentioned that they lost employees because of it. As we make plans for reopening, how can we accommodate this “lesson learned” and make our communications to employees very clear and as long-term as possible, including clear criteria by which future changes will be made.
The CDC and WHO have provided helpful guidelines to be used by leaders in their decision making: The WHO recommends: “…nonessential workers return when there is a sustained decrease in community transmission, a decreased rate of positive tests, sufficient testing available to detect new outbreaks, and adequate local hospital capacity to accommodate a surge of new cases should that occur.” (HBR, May 28, 2020).
Decisions for bringing people back to the office can be complicated because there were no clear criteria for closing in the first place. Because of this, defining a clear objective and clear decision criteria for bringing employees back will be a huge part of the continuation of high performance.
For discussion and ideas, please contact us at [email protected] or [email protected].
Leave a Reply