Getting back to the office after the lockdown

In every country across the world, businesses have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and whilst many people are talking about, and looking forward to, getting ‘back to normal’, we have to be very careful to understand what normal is going to look like, how it’s going to impact on office life and business in the long term, and how we’re going to transition from ways of working which were at first reactive, but have now become business as usual for many.

We can also learn some important lessons about business continuity, which will definitely serve us well in the future as these far-reaching events become more common.

The pandemic

First, let’s remind ourselves of what happened in early 2020. The first recorded case of COVID-19 was in China on November 17th, 2019, and as the virus began to spread across the world, governments rushed to close borders and restrict the movement of people in order to slow down the progress. The World Health Organisation announced that COVID-19 had reached pandemic status on March 11th, and countries began to ‘lock down’ their economies, closing all but essential public facing businesses. Shops, restaurants, bars and many service businesses could not operate and scarce resources were diverted into healthcare, food supply and transport for key workers.

The Internet has been part of our daily lives for almost 30 years, and with readily accessible high speed broadband, laptops and distributed business software, moving staff from offices out to their homes seemed like an easy way to keep business operations running. After all, staff had been working remotely and flexibly for years. If they can send emails and write reports on a train or in a coffee shop, why not from home?

It turned out that there were a few more obstacles to achieving this simple solution.

At face value, it seemed that working from home was the answer to every office worker’s prayers. No commuting. An extra hour in bed and with the family. Saving money on commuting costs. No need to dress for work. The regular interviews on the TV news switched from having experts in the studio to speaking to them via video at home. Every politician, professor and industry representative turned their spare bedroom into a TV studio, complete with a bookcase in the background, stocked with suitably intellectual titles, certificates and assorted awards. The technology was easy to implement, but it revealed an important point about our lives. When you walk out of your front door to go to work, you leave behind the private sanctuary of your home. You put on your ‘work face’ and play your part for the day. With video team meetings, the office has reached into your home. This is a significant change from simply working from home and being available by email or phone. Now, when you tell your boss that you’re looking at the sales figures right now, you better had be, because she or he can see exactly where you are and what you’re doing. Not only that but when your family are competing for use of the same space, they’re now part of your work life too. We’ve seen many embarrassing examples of this, and I’m sure you’ve been either amused or embarrassed by some of the things you’ve seen in online meetings.

Not everyone has the luxury of a spare room, sitting around waiting to be transformed into the perfect home workspace. Many people are competing with their partners and children for space at the dining table, taking it in turn to attend online meetings or school sessions. Most people don’t have the luxury of a dining room, and are working at the kitchen table, or crouched over the coffee table. The less space that people have at home, and the more they have to compete with others for that space, the keener they are to ‘get back to normal’ and get back into the relative calm of the office.

Employers are therefore faced with two extremes when getting back to the office after the lockdown. At one extreme, we have people who can’t wait to get their old routine back. At the other, we have people who can’t think of anything worse. The biggest challenge for employers is not opening the doors and creating safe workspaces. The biggest challenge is in integrating these two extremes.

Practical measures to minimise the risk of infection

Let’s cover some of the practicalities.

Every country has its own regulations but in general, you will need to assess the risks for your particular workplace, maintain social distancing and implement good sanitisation practices.

Maintain a distance of one to two metres between staff, and you will need to provide screens, one way systems and protective equipment and sanitiser. You should implement staggered working and break times where possible.

You’ll need to clean workspaces and shared areas more often, and do what you can to improve ventilation.

Where your staff are interacting with the public, you also need to introduce additional measures to maintain distance and minimise physical contact.

You’ll also need to consider the mental health impact of all of these measures, perhaps providing additional support for staff who need it.

You can expect flexible working to be more common in the future. Businesses have had to invest more in assets such as IT equipment and furniture for home working, and it makes sense to make as much use as possible of these assets. Many staff will be more productive when working from home, not least because of the time they save commuting. Don’t expect them to spend that time working, as presenteeism is potentially a bigger problem for home based workers who can’t see their colleagues going home. A physical office has office hours, and if you already had staff working outside normal hours, you can expect this to become even more common and as a manager or employer, you have a duty of care to your staff, as well as a legal obligation in many countries to enforce working time limits.

Managers will need to have more regular check-ins with their staff, and asking if they’re OK is simply not good enough. Most people will reply that they are fine, even when they’re not. Many managers will be afraid to start a conversation that has the potential of leading to conflict or the disclosure of uncomfortable personal or emotional information, and so it’s easier just to accept ‘fine’ as a good enough answer. As a manager, if you don’t dig deeper now, you will face much worse consequences later on. Take the time to really understand how the pandemic has affected your staff on a personal level. Take time to understand the pressures in their lives and whilst those pressures are not your responsibility, you do have a great deal of influence and you can certainly avoid adding to them.

Tied to the workplace

There are many organisations, and many jobs, that are tied to a place. Factories, for example, have machinery that can only be operated on site. Schools and universities have implemented some online teaching but most of what they do has to be delivered on-site. We also have to remember that a large proportion of children don’t have access to a computer or a high speed internet connection, so the idea of remote teaching is a nice dream, but the reality looks very different for many families, and this creates a digital divide which puts many learners at a disadvantage. Schools and universities have a lot of work to do to create a truly fair and equal education system in the 21st century.

One important aspect that managers need to consider is that where staff don’t have the choice to work remotely because of the nature of their job, they might feel additional stress caused by the health risks of the workplace. Some people will say that there have always been health risks, for example the seasonal flu or other illnesses transmitted through human contact. The difference is that an outbreak of flu does not lead to the visible changes we’ve all seen in workplaces, shops and restaurants. We cannot see the virus, but warning signs, plastic screens and face masks are a daily reminder of the risks that we each face. In the familiarity and relative security of the workplace, these warning signs and protective measures take on a new dimension - they are a constant reminder to staff that there is something to fear. Even if we are not consciously aware of this, these reminders do increase the background level of stress that we experience, and stress increases the risk of illness as well as the risk of poor decision making around safety practices. When you’re making signs and writing policies and procedures, you might consider the message that you’re sending. Instead of communicating “you are in danger”, think about how you can instead communicate, “follow these guidelines and stay safe”.

Learning

Corporate learning providers have responded quickly to take content online, and this has appealed to many corporate managers who want to minimise unproductive time. Of course, learning professionals would say that without time invested in learning, there is no productive time to follow. However, due to an increasing perception of time pressure, many learning providers have turned to bite sized learning and the delivery of micro-content, for example delivering reminders via short text messages. Whilst this approach can appear to save time, it can create other problems if the focus is on ease and speed of delivery, rather than appropriateness of a learner-centred design. Good learning creates space for learners to think for themselves, to assimilate new experiences and to reflect and share their learning, so simply sending them a daily reminder can lead to dependency and a lack of autonomy and initiative.

Bringing people together to learn is an important aspect of building social cohesion and organisational culture. Learning doesn’t mean paying attention while someone reads out a new procedure, it means being part of the process of creating new knowledge. This is known by learning experts as ‘social constructivist learning’ and it plays an important part in building strong teams, because each person contributes their own experiences and ideas. From a learning design point of view, this is also the fastest way to innovate and incorporate best practice, because the people who are experiencing the fastest rate of change at the customer interface are able to bring that learning into the heart of the business. We know that the businesses that are most likely to survive an event like this are the ones who can respond fastest to change, and speed of response depends directly on speed of communication and the extent to which you are able to distribute learning through the organisation.

Integrating teams

One of the biggest challenges in managing teams spread across various working locations is how to build a sense of team spirit and inclusion, whether people are in an office or not. Many managers are very familiar with this challenge, particularly with field based teams such as on-site service or sales.

One of the simplest and most important ways to build this team spirit is with routine. Have a regular team meeting, whether you think you need one or not. Get team members to take turns in sharing an update, running a training session or even chairing the meeting. In the field of mental health, getting people to talk about what’s going on for them even when they think nothing is going on is vitally important. If we only communicate when there’s a problem, the problem will be much bigger by the time we actually feel the need to communicate. It’s very easy to get into the habit of only communicating when you think your team need to know something, but if that’s the case, you’re missing an important opportunity to listen.

Communication is one of the aspects that defines the human race. Create a culture of regular communication and you will build a stronger team.

Managers have to get used to different working practices, and I’ve covered this in another Bookboon Audio Learning session. Remember that whether you’re used to managing a remote team or not, and whether it’s the way you would like things to be or not is immaterial. This is the way that things are, and it is the way that things will be for many months to come, and if you’re listening to this beyond 2020, you’ll also recognise that there are changes that we made in order to react to the pandemic that have stayed with us.

Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind as a manager is that some of your team will thrive from working remotely, and you will need to support that within your working practices. Other members of your team will struggle, and for them, you need to provide safe support within the office environment. Ultimately, you will end up with a more resilient team, and a stronger business.

Business continuity

Since the 1980s, when large centralised IT infrastructures became common and telecommunications technologies became faster and cheaper, the concept of disaster recovery and business continuity became a strategic issue. What if our staff couldn’t get into this office? Could we relocate them somewhere else?

Companies emerged that specialised in providing empty warehouses that could be filled with your staff and connected to your IT systems in a matter of hours. Business leaders were afraid that their operations were dependent on having people, in buildings, sitting in front of computer screens. Back then, the biggest threat was from a computer virus.

The combination of desktop and cloud computing has made these disaster recovery centres largely redundant. Even if we were still reliant on such facilities, they would not have helped during the COVID pandemic because moving staff from one building to another would have made no difference. Even relocating operations to another country would have been useless.

The ability to share your business operations around flexible locations makes your business or your team stronger and more resilient. By the time you listen to this, life might well be back to some kind of normality, but we can be sure that this is not the last time we will need to handle such a threat. Don’t just think about future pandemics, and certainly don’t use the excuse that no-one could have predicted this.

Previous outbreaks such as SARS and MERS did provide some warning. The organisers of the Wimbledon tennis tournament took out insurance to protect against such events and since the SARS outbreak of 2003, have paid ￡25m in insurance premiums, and this year that insurance policy paid them ￡114m. So whilst we couldn’t have predicted when the pandemic happened, there are many experts who knew that something like this was going to happen, at some point, and are predicting that it will happen again. We don’t know when the next life-changing event will happen, and we don’t know what it will be, but what we have learned during 2020 is how to be more resilient, how to build better communities, how to recognise the things that are most important to us and how to survive and, ultimately, thrive.

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Peter Freeth is a talent and leadership expert, coach and author. Learn more at genius.coach

Bookboon is a global publisher of digital learning with an excellent corporate library service.