Steve Salee is the Founder and CEO of Wildfire Strategies. He loves helping high-stakes teams and leaders work better together.
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I’ve been talking with leaders in healthcare, law, finance and education about heading back to the office, and there is so much more to consider in the return to “normal” than just physical safety and economic urgency. While we are all eager for normalcy, it would be a mistake for organizations to rush to fill office chairs. Before they bring teams back to offices, leaders need to first capture what employees have learned from life during the pandemic. Rushing will only cause further turbulence and hurt performance.
Real-World Concerns
The leaders I’ve spoken with have identified three return-to-work concerns that need to be addressed as the world emerges from the pandemic:
1. It’s not just about Covid-19. People may be afraid to return to work because of possible infection, but they’re also likely harboring a lot of anxiety around things that have nothing to do with the virus. Feelings of dread come from numerous structural issues that were likely present before the pandemic, but have been avoidable over the past year, such as commuting hassles, challenging workplace relationships and hated job responsibilities.
2. We’re grappling with divergent experiences. Normally, the workplace is a self-reinforcing social bond that aligns coworkers through daily shared experiences. The pandemic has severed that daily social bond and created divergent experiences around health, loss and financial security that may leave us feeling misaligned with our coworkers. All this has been exacerbated by isolation and the national discord that came to a head in the last year. While returning to the office may be exciting to think about, the reality may be more jarring.
3. The workplace itself looks different. Pre-pandemic, most workplaces expected employees to work in person, but the pandemic has forced employers to acknowledge that remote work may not be the productivity drain they feared it would be. Now that flexible work is here, employees are unlikely to tolerate workplaces that try to simply put the genie back into a one-size-fits-all bottle.
What You Can Do
While each of these challenges requires a unique response, there are three actions every leader should take to set their organizations up for return-to-work success.
1. Show you care. Your team has a range of reactions to the idea of returning to the workplace. Let them know, publicly and frequently, that you understand this and that you are there to support them through the process. If leaders make time to listen to structural concerns and offer a process for thinking through solutions, employees will feel supported in tackling what’s really worrying them.
2. Capture employee insights. Employees have fresh, valuable insights to share from work during the pandemic. Don’t miss this opportunity to capture them. To create more resilient and respectful workplace cultures, leaders need to invite employees to share their unique experiences from the past year and capture learnings for the organization.
3. Welcome the chance to innovate. The organizations that will successfully transition out of the pandemic will be those that design new flexible work arrangements in partnership with staff. Together, leaders and teams can be more selective about when it makes the most sense for people to come together in person for work and when it might be more useful for them to work independently in remote locations. Don’t let a crisis go to waste; tell your team that you want to take what you’ve all learned and, together, make your organization a better and more successful place to work.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll cover each of these return-to-work concerns in more depth and share a framework for how leaders like you can address each one. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve outlined here, and whether you have other return-to-work challenges to share.
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