As the country slowly and hopefully opens, how organizations will handle on-site / remote work has gained enormous attention. Will you push to bring everyone or most employees back on-site? Will you plan to do much or most of your work remote? Will you permit employee flexibility? What balance will you strike and what are the implications for your leadership style, management practice and organizational functioning?
Because of your move to Delmar DivINe, the issue becomes more complicated. First, how will you operate in the ambiguous transitional period during the next 4 – 9 months, as we hopefully reach some measure of herd immunity? And then what changes will be necessary when you move to Delmar Divine? How will organizational culture and operations need to evolve from pre-Covid, to now, to move-in? Whatever you ultimately decide; it will not be the same as pre-Covid.
Hopefully, you and your leadership team have already begun thinking through these questions along with the hard decisions about office configuration, protocols, and provisions for ensuring the health and safety of your team, clients and visitors. You might consider developing two or three alternatives depending on the pace of opening and the response of staff, clients and volunteers.
In this brief letter, we want to raise several inter-connected issues to consider:
· Understanding and responding to employee needs, expectations and fears
· Shaping, re-shaping and maintaining organizational culture
· Facilitating employee connections and socialization
Talk to your employees:
Though we endured the shared burden of the pandemic; we experienced it and reacted in varied and often idiosyncratic ways. Make no assumptions about how your employees are feeling and thinking. Recognize their losses – personal and financial. Ask them about their hopes, fears, needs and expectations. Ask them how they want to work. You ramped up caregiving during the worst of the pandemic and they were appreciative. However, now they expect it.
Over-communication is essential in any crisis or moment of change. Keep employees fully informed of your thinking and planning as it develops. Be available, transparent and repeat the information regularly. Demonstrate your commitment to a healthy work environment. Monitor health performance indicators. You need to cultivate cognitive and emotional trust – especially among new employees who haven’t yet had face to face interactions. Schedule periodic pulse checks.
Be fair in determining who may work from home; who must come on-site. Do senior managers get preferential treatment? Provide supports for remote work. Consider whether changes in compensation or benefits are required. Take care that newly realized improvements in productivity resulting from remote work, don’t blur work and personal time, and lead to hyper-productivity and burn-out.
Proactively Shape & Reshape Culture:
A positive, mission and strategy-aligned organizational culture is critical to organizational performance and employee satisfaction. Culture is the sum of the underlying values, beliefs and mental models that shape norms of behavior. It’s “the way we do it around here.” Culture is communicated, modeled and reinforced in day-to-day interactions that employees have with leaders and colleagues. That has been seriously compromised during the pandemic. Likewise, the office is a location for on-the-job and peer-to-peer learning as information is shared through observation and casual conversations. Employees can find themselves in an out-of-sight, out-of-sync and out-of-touch mode that hampers performance, growth and engagement.
The transition back to your organization’s “new normal” may require re-socialization to important values and norms, as well as adjustments and changes to accommodate the new reality. Managers may need training in social and relational aspects of remote work and managing hybrid teams.
If you have on-boarded new staff during the pandemic (or intend to in coming months) pay close attention to how culture has, or has not, been communicated, and how training may have been affected. Absent those casual conversations and in-office observations, it may be difficult for new staff to understand what’s expected and how your organization does business. Having lacked opportunity to meet and build personal connections with supervisors and peers; they may lack a sense of psychological safety and fear asking questions.
Build Personal Connections:
Beyond their effect on culture and learning; most of us have craved personal connections during the pandemic. There is much being written today about the role of office relationships in combatting loneliness, providing a sense of belonging, team bonding, enhancing health and wellness, preventing burnout as well as contributing to collaboration, innovation and productivity. We’ve missed the water-cooler and the casual connections that enrich our day, such as a chat with the receptionist.
Use office time wisely! Assuming your staff will spend a good deal of time remote (at least for the near future); prioritize in-office for face-time and collaborative work: staff meetings, open door time, supervisory conferences, brainstorming, social occasions. Schedule so people see each other. Reconstruct work processes to shift administrative tasks remotely. Use hybrid (in-person / online) meetings to accommodate remote workers. Manage for human connections. Give permission by modeling your own availability and sociability.
· Schedule periodic Town Halls to share information and include a fun activity.
· Schedule social time in-person and online. Virtual coffee breaks. Trivia party.
· Schedule online “open door” time when remote employees can drop in to ask a question, check an idea, or just say hello.
· Incorporate components in Zoom meetings that help create personal connections:
o a fun check in question at the start of a meeting or share pet pics.
o Zoom bingo during your next all-staff meeting.
Organizations that use Microsoft Teams or SLACK for office productivity, collaboration and communication have a great tool to help promote relationship building. Real time chat, channels that can be set for social purposes, and apps like Donut for SLACK are designed to facilitate connections. Since TEAMs is already included in Microsoft 365 (and individual accounts are free), it may be a cost-effective tool for streamlining ongoing management with the added bonus of improving community.