Employees Returning to the Office: 4 Ways to Encourage Their Returnsubmitted on 13 May 2021
When your employees have been happily working from home, encouraging them to return to the office could be an uphill task. Assuring them that measures have been taken to provide for their safety certainly will go a long way to achieving this.
Here are 4 ways to encourage employees to return to the office.
Use Safety Shields for Office Cubicles
Many office cubicles include dividers that are low enough that employees can look over to their colleagues. This allows for airflow to be shared between staff members too easily in these worrisome times.
To make the cubicle much safer for staff to use, add to the divider to create a safer barrier. Physical barriers, such as these from https://barrierlab.com/, are attached securely at the top and extend the overall height. It stops contaminated air from traveling between cubicles when someone sneezes or coughs.
Daily Temperature Checks & More
A rapid Covid test is a useful one to verify that employees are not returning to the office infected. It can be performed quickly, and the results are available just as quickly. By using a test of this kind when all employees return, they’ve at least passed an initial test. This means it’s going to be much safer than not testing employees.
Temperature checks should also be performed at all entrances. This may help to subsequently catch new infections.
Letting staff know that about both the rapid Covid test to return to the office and the temperature checks every time they enter the building should provide some assurance.
Flexible Hours
A worker who has been on a flexible schedule at home may not like the idea of returning to fixed hours. To mitigate their concerns, instigate a flexible hours approach where they can start earlier or later, and finish at a different time too.
Look at offering extended lunch breaks for people to get daytime errands completed. They can come in earlier or stay later to make up the time. This provides flexibility that they may have now become accustomed to.
Also, don’t be as rigid about requests for time off. While it’s inconvenient to cover an employee taking a couple of days off, it shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. The business should be set up to handle absences and manage perfectly fine. When it’s not, that needs to be looked at.
Make It Mandatory
While it’s preferable to avoid doing so, when the company needs staff to return to the office, then they’ll come to a point of impasse. When an employee is unwilling to end the remote worker status and return to the office, it may be necessary to make it mandatory.
The company does need to operate in the best way possible. If managing staff remotely was only ever meant to be a stop-gap situation, then sticking to it may be unacceptable. That should be made clear to employees who refuse to return to the office.
Encouraging employees to return to the office should be done in multiple steps. Usually, this will be persuasive enough. While not everyone will embrace the idea with the same level of enthusiasm, do what’s possible to make it safer and more comfortable for everyone concerned.
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