As a business owner, what will your 2021 vintage of “normal” be like? Will it be a full-bodied return to work of all staff, a delicate blend of some being in the office and others working from home – or a gradual increase of production and bringing in more and more staff off furlough? While you are balancing your options and your cashflow, how easy is it for you to know how your staff feel about coming back to work? Are they telling you how they truly feel, or bottling things up and saying what they think you want to hear?
The Government are urging all staff to go back to the office from working from home, but is it that simple? Do you need to change your various business insurances or when was the last time the office was cleaned – do you have to organise a deeper clean of some kind before people come back? What risk assessments do you need to have in place? there is a strong chance local authority staff may inspect to confirm you are complying.
Are you a people person? What would you do if one of your staff members was very nervous about coming back to the office? There are so many ways you can achieve the return; do you have some staff always in the office and some always at home? Alternatively, you could have a rota system where people worked some days in the office and some at home, so you could still achieve space between where people are working.
If you do have some staff in the office, and some at home, you must think of everyone. Not only respect the feelings of those who wish to work from home, but also be mindful to make sure the people who work in the office still can. If you have less people in an office, then those interruptions could make working life hard. When someone needs an urgent query answering and has come into the office, there are less people; or when someone can’t get hold of the person working from home and wants the answer now.
What are you to do, you are too small to have your own HR person? Yet none of this seems the sort of problems those large HR companies attend to – this is not something that can be solved by an off the shelf policy or series of posters. The workplace dynamic is a thing of art and emotion not science, working well you have a workforce that punches well above its weight. However, when things go wrong, productivity tumbles, disagreements occur, and teamwork goes out the window. That is why it is very important to have a return-to-work plan in place to take all of the areas detailed above into consideration. Having a return-to-work plan will give you a roadmap of how to get to your new ‘normal’ but also give your team confidence in the coming changes or different ways of working.
That is where AJ HR comes in, perhaps the best way to consider us is a friendly HR from the “area office”, a personal contact who is there on the end of a phone line, a zoom call or when we can in person. But do not forget more than the manager can seek help from a virtual HR person, we are there for all the members of staff, one dedicated point of contact. This means we can not only give you the vibes we are receiving, but also provide them in a way that gives everyone’s feelings.
When we work with you as virtual HR, we get to know your business, and you and your staff. This not only means that we can guide you through the minefield of employment law to make sure you have no bombs waiting to explode, but also help you with training and recruitment plans. We can look at these plans with you in the light of working a different way to see if you need to make tweaks, create online learning packages for staff working from home, for example. Come up with ideas such as newsletters to keep that workplace dynamic even when it is multi-centred.
Why not contact us today for a free consultation to see how we can help your whole workforce.
