Is Your Team Ready to Return to Work?
Helpful Tips to Guide You Lead your Team Back to the Office
In March 2020, the term ‘the new normal’ was used to describe how we adapted to the realities of living through a global pandemic. We’ve moved our routines, offices, social activities, and lives into the comfort of our homes. Now, the ‘new normal’ will be used as we transition into the post-pandemic world. In a recent survey by Leger, results showed that only 20% of Canadians want to stop working from home and go back to the office full time. Flexible work options are table stakes at this point. Most workplaces respond to the request for flexibility by implementing hybrid work models from home and the office.
However, choosing the work model is the easy part. As your team has spent the last 14+ months apart, you must wonder if your team is ready to return to work. The more critical question you need to ask is if you are ready to lead in a hybrid model.
For leaders, part of the equation is on how to communicate and transition. After all, we have all been working remotely for a very long time and have settled into a pattern. Your responsibility will include:
Be human and understand the whole world is going through one of the biggest changes in human history. It will take your team some time to settle in again. Offer your support and space for your team to figure the transition out.
Be an artist and paint a vivid picture of what the future looks like once everyone has settled. Talk about how you see your team will work together, talk about what high quality work looks like, talk about what frictionless collaboration looks like. The more vivid the picture, the more your team can know what to expect.
Be predictable. Hybrid work has a high degree of flexibility and ambiguity as well. Your team will need some anchors to plan around. Be that anchor by prescribing some predictability in their lives. These could be recurring meetings, silent work days, collaborative work days, etc.
Some guiding principles that you can keep in mind as you lead your team returning to work are:
Entice and not mandate. Create the opportunities to entice your team to have in-person collaboration. Prescribing and mandating these will risk creating an instinctual resistant reaction.
Return slowly and listen to your team. There are so many operational aspects to consider ranging from infection prevention to managing onsite/remote schedules. Try out your plan, listen for feedback and course correct as needed.
Celebrate. Guess what, the fact that you are able to begin working together in-person is worth celebrating. Continue to celebrate each other because life is too precious to not enjoy our work.
If you remember these principles, you are well on your way to creating a seamless transition through any change. To learn more about how you can set your team up for success as they transition back to the office, watch my short video on Change Management here. Have questions or need support with your team’s transition back to work? Send me an email at tony.yu@sensenous.ca