The great return and making it work

It has been a difficult couple of years, all with Covid, war, and now potentially one of the harshest recessions seen for generations heading our way. Like many of us, companies are bringing or at least trying to bring full-timers on site, but as we all know while some employees welcome that return, others are more resistant to that prospect. In fact, in a recent McKinsey study, 29% of respondents said they would consider looking for a new job if their employers insisted, that they work onsite full time. Naturally, this has triggered employers to begin exploring ways they can bring employees back, without triggering mass resignations, damaging the company culture or employee happiness.

It's hard to mention this topic and not mention Elon Musk, who demanded that all employees begin working onsite at least 40 hours per week within seven days or quit, famously being quoted as saying ‘’ they can pretend to work somewhere else‘’, this approach potentially about to result in about 40% of the company's 100,000 employees being expected to quit or be fired, according to news reports.

Now we can all agree that threats aren’t exactly the most engaging of strategies, more often than not these have the opposite effect intended. So as more businesses bring employees back onsite, HR can counter the pushback by ensuring the below form part of your Returning to work plan.

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1.?Lead from the front, with empathy

Unfortunately, more often than not, we see executives who are advocates of working in the office or in person, but then prefer flexible arrangements for themselves. Now of course, certain positions have more autonomy, responsibility and flexibility dependent on a number of factors of course, but if your people are not going to see the leaders of the business, department or team be the first persons back in the office, how can it then be expected that employees will embrace that same direction? Which means a key part to the success of any HR departments plan is to get the leaders of the business to champion it.

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2.?Communicate Your Intentions Clearly and Compassionately?

If there is one thing we should have all learnt throughout the Covid period, is just how important communication is, and it very much being a key to success for any plan. Your people take care of your business, so it goes without saying that you too should be taking care of them, so keeping them in the loop as to not only decisions but the lead up to those decisions, the research, the insights, and the reasoning, this not only getting their buy in but will also give your people time to acclimatize to the change.

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3.?Develop a well thought out plan?

Whatever the company direction is, HR shouldn't feel rushed to bring people back into the office without a detailed plan of action, there is no one approach, and each HR department needs to look at the needs of their business, available resources and readiness. One thing is for certain though this plan does need to consider the impacts to the business, logistics, individual employee readiness and a well-structured timeline that properly accommodates all of this, last thing any ones is hundreds of employees coming in all on the one day.

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4. Prioritize benefits that encompass work life balance and well-being

Consider ways that help tie in people’s personal lives in with time spent at work. Things like child care, education and learning, haircuts, nails, healthy food, gyms and anything else that is predominately only possible physically and can be done at the office.

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5. Flexibility

Though the business might be taking more of a direction towards office work and face time, this doesn’t have to take away from the flexibility aspect of people’s jobs. So don’t lose out on what really does work. Most employees are resistant to coming back to the office out of fear that they will lose the flexibility they have come to appreciate over the last several years. So its worth looking at keeping elements of that through flexible scheduling like choice of shifts, a hybrid (Office/Remote) work model or even Core hours with flexible start and finish times.

Now of course, each business is unique and though these 5 elements should really form part of any Return-to-work plan, not every business is the same which is why we at We Consult You ensure that when working with our clients, we come work with each business to find the right plan direction and plan that best suits them and where there business needs to be. For more information, on this or any other service, please check us out here or pin us an email on [email protected] or get in touch with me directly on [email protected]