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Has the Delta Variant Disrupted Your Office Reopening Plans? - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN
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Summary.
The latest surge in Covid-19 cases generated by the Delta variant is throwing a wrench into plans to have employees return to the office. How can leaders deal with the uncertainty? This article offers six principles: 1) Continue to prioritize employees’ well-being; 2) Be adaptive; 3) Massively step up your communications; 4) Rethink your biases about work; 5) Learn from Zoom natives; and 6) Don’t rush to declare the future.
Just as companies are preparing to bring remote employees back to their offices or institute a “hybrid” arrangement (a mix of remote and in-the-office work), a once-again spiking infection rate due to the Delta variant is driving many of them to put their announced reopenings on hold. This latest twist in the Covid-19 pandemic is one more on a long list — and it may well not be the last. In light of this reality, here are six principles that executives can apply in their reopening decision-making and communications.
1. Continue to prioritize employees’ well-being.
Vaccinated people are at a far lower risk of contracting Covid-19, including the Delta variant, and are less likely to suffer serious illness if they do. Still, recent data has drawn attention to rare breakthrough cases,
and the risk to unvaccinated people and those with compromised immune
systems remains high. Meanwhile, many employees have new or enhanced
challenges in areas such as childcare, elder care, and mental health. Reopening
without consideration to these can have profoundly negative effects on
morale and retention. So as leaders continue to prioritize employee
well-being relating to minimizing Covid infections in the workplace,
they should also consider ways in which they can help employees through
these challenges by providing flexibility, support, or benefits.
2. Be adaptive.
Employees desire clear direction, and leaders gravitate towards providing it. It is not uncommon for managers to fall into the trap of “symbolic plans” for dealing with a crisis —
plans that look good on paper but are useless when you actually try to
implement them. When the future is unpredictable — as it continues to be
thanks to the pandemic — it makes sense to keep options open. As
leaders share their decisions about reopening timing and the mix
between remote and onsite work, it is important to be upfront and honest
about what they don’t know. They should also ensure they have
contingencies in place with clear assumptions and thresholds for when
they might need to change course.
3. Massively step up your communications.
The
challenge, though, with being adaptive is that it can increase anxiety
among employees who have already been through a tremendous amount of
change during the pandemic. Leaders need to recognize this anxiety and
communicate in ways that help defuse or reduce it, rather than feeding
it. For instance, we know of a large financial services firm whose
leaders have told employees that while they don’t know what the future
will bring, they will notify them at least six weeks in advance of any
changes to work-from-home policies.
Another
way for leaders to avoid increasing employee anxiety is to hone their
listening skills to parse the nuances in what employees are asking for.
Leaders truly need to walk a mile in their employees’ shoes to
understand what they are looking for and how they will react to
decisions.
Setting
up employee advisory groups to review and even co-create
recommendations on the future of work, frequently pulse checking
employee sentiment, and soliciting suggestions are all important ways to
ensure communications are two-way.
4. Rethink your biases about work.
The proportion of employed people who worked at home almost doubled during the pandemic. This shift demonstrated the viability of remote work for many types of jobs.
Still, many leaders remain worried about moving permanently to remote
work, and some harbor concerns about the impacts on productivity,
innovation, or culture. While there may certainly be risks in each of
these areas, there are some offsetting benefits, too, if remote work is
done right. Take
productivity. The major problem that has hurt productivity during the
pandemic is not remote work; it’s that we just replaced all our
interactions with video conferences and then added more meetings into
the mix.
Leaders
of organizations need to rethink forums of interaction and replace
synchronous (thus inflexible and inefficient) meetings with asynchronous
tools such as GoogleDocs (which we used to coauthor this article). When
a real-time discussion is essential, well-run video meetings often can orchestrate more effective collaboration
than in-person meetings can. This does require thoughtful meeting
facilitation and using video platforms to their full potential (e.g.,
digital whiteboards, survey tools, breakout conversations, and so on)
and not just as a bland substitute for heads around a conference table. Likewise,
the belief that innovation necessarily requires in-person interaction
is flawed. Consider how, during the past 18 months or so, we all figured
out how to serve customers, develop products, build relationships, and
solve problems while working remotely. Those solutions did not come from
centralized innovation labs; instead, they were the product of team
members coming together to find creative solutions. Leaders would do
well to learn from this experience and focus on ways to unleash their
teams’ inherent creativity.
Corporate
leaders are justifiably worried about losing the ability to forge a
strong organizational culture and engender shared values especially
among newer cohorts of hires. But they need to realize that the
decisions they make around flexible work and how they communicate those
decisions also have a tremendous impact on organizational culture.
Insisting
on bringing people back to the office just so they can be supervised
more closely has a counterproductive effect by displaying a lack of
trust. Conversely, letting teams decide together what works best for
them will help build a culture of trust and mutual accountability.
Taking the high ground here can have a terrific impact on corporate
culture, something Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, clearly recognized when
he signed and promoted a pledge to support his colleagues working from home. Leaders
need to recognize that many of the fears that working remotely will
reduce productivity and innovation or weaken an organization’s culture
are either overstated or can be mitigated through careful design of
interactions, values-driven communication, and upskilling of managers.
The good news on upskilling is that the teachers likely exist throughout
your organization. Every organization has managers who have innovated,
engaged, connected, and delivered throughout the pandemic. Find them
and determine what knowledge, skills, attitudes, routines, and tools
they deployed to make it work. And then have them teach their peers how
to do what they do.
5. Learn from “Zoom natives.”
There
are ways to counter some of these downsides, and a good place to look
for them is recent college grads who started their careers during the
pandemic. They spent anywhere from a couple of months to more than a
year attending college remotely. Consequently, they are experienced in
truly forming social connections remotely, going beyond the Zoom box to
build meaningful personal connections. For instance, many of them have
become comfortable engaging virtual meeting participants in private
sidebar chats much as they did during class.
While
senior leaders or older employees may have mastered the remote meeting,
they may still be wired to believe that the only way to build a real
relationship is in person. One remedy is reverse mentoring: pairing them
with younger employees and explicitly charging the “Zoom natives” to
mentor them on the social aspects of remote and asynchronous
interactions.
6. Don’t rush to declare the future.
We
have collectively learned a lot about how work can get done under the
challenging circumstances of the pandemic. However, this is an ongoing
process of discovery, and conclusions about the future of work are
premature. It will take a while to mine the learnings from how the
pandemic impacted our work environment. The right answer for the long
term will vary by context, specific working styles, and the preferences
of team leaders and members.
So,
as we go back to work premises (or not) we need to take an experimental
mindset and be willing to learn our way there — or better yet, shape
the future together with our colleagues.
As
pressure builds on leaders to make decisions relating to getting office
workers back onsite or letting them work remotely either part time or
full time, they face a minefield. We hope these principles will help
guide choices that are optimal and will enable leaders to approach this
dilemma in a way that improves morale, retains employees, maintains or
improves performance, and strengthens the corporate culture and
employees’ affiliation with the organization.
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