You're on the clock! The "this time we're really returning to the office" guide: part 2
The countdown to return-to-office has started. Are you ready?
This is the second of three articles outlining the key stages, decision points, and priorities for establishing and executing your return to the office. In Part 1 we explained why this time the return timeline is real, and outlined the big picture considerations you should be working through ASAP.
Now, in Part 2, we will discuss specific operational planning you should be working through 4+ months ahead of returning. Finally, next week in Part 3, we’ll dive deeper into the implementation phase and tactical items to work through leading up to return.
4+ months out: the operational stuff
Once you’ve started finalizing key decisions on the big picture stuff, you’ll need to quickly shift focus to the operational priorities required to get back into the office. This phase is heavy on policy-making and additional decisions around how you’ll approach hybrid work.
The key operational topics we’ll cover are:
Set a return date
Draft your safety and compliance protocols
Outline company guidelines and norms around office attendance
Establish the role managers will play regarding in-office policies
Determine how you’ll approach vaccination requirements
Firm up your plan for virtual hiring
Start shaping your in-office vs. remote/WFH benefits
Bonus: invest in software that will give you and your teams leverage!
Set a return date!
Ideally you’ll be well into the operational stuff by the time you are 4+ months away from your target return date. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, that means the first operational priority is to set a return date!
Setting an official date allows you to map out the timeline of work you need to do to get ready. Keep in mind that, as of the time I’m writing this in early March, that means if your company is going back around July 4th 2021 you’re already at less than 4 months. If you’re targeting Labor Day, you should have a bit more time to work with, but not much.
You’ve likely done this a few times already, so you know setting the date isn’t the hard part — it’s being confident that it will stick. You also have the added risk of communicating yet-another-date-that-will-change to your company.
There’s a balance to strike, but confidence levels around return are justifiably much higher this time. And as the world around you increases their return anticipation, so will your employees. They’ll be looking for an update so they can start to plan their own timelines.
Draft your safety and compliance protocols
Safety & compliance will seem like the obvious priorities in any reopening plan, but they also require unique considerations. Protocols for COVID are evolving weekly, and even the CDC hasn’t given clear guidelines on what post-vaccine social rules will look like. Masks, temperature checks, quarantine, social distancing, etc. are all up for change.
That’s why this part of the operational work says “draft.” That’s the best you can do, is outline the proposed safety protocols, and use that as a foundation you can evolve and update in the time leading up to the actual return.
Key components of that plan should include:
Check-ins: What type of "check-in” procedure will you establish when employees first come back? Requiring daily check-ins enables you to maintain logs, contact trace, and more. That can go all the way to restricting office access to checked-in employees — but is that the employee experience you want?
Symptom surveys: Will you establish (or continue using) daily symptom / wellness surveys to make sure employees are healthy? We won’t know for sure if that’s relevant to vaccinated employees, but you can include a hypothesis in your draft. If you won’t be requiring vaccines (more on this below) will those employees need to attest that they are symptom free?
Temperature checks: Some organizations have added on-site temperature checks for the limited number of folks coming into the office. Is this something you will want to do as an organization? This will be hard to decide now, but you can at least set decision criteria (e.g. “we’ll do what the CDC advises” or “we’ll do what peers are doing.”)
Mask requirements: What mask usage will be expected of employees in the office? Again, this is tied closely to vaccination requirements, and is something you can likely only draft a point of view on now, knowing it may evolve. Establishing a decision framework here (like I mentioned above re: temperature checks) will save you from additional cycles on this topic when you’re closer to return (and have your hands FULL).
Outline company guidelines and norms around office attendance
One of the reasons it’s so important to have determined your “flavor of hybrid” is because it gives you a base framework for making important decisions around in-office guidelines. This is likely to be one of the trickiest parts of balancing flexibility and control as an organization. It’s also likely to be a point of tension between executives, HR leaders, and employees.
There are several key guidelines you’ll want to work through to prepare to establish expectations with your employees:
Minimum days in-office: If you’re a “office by default,” local hybrid, or “remote friendly” organization, you may want to establish minimums for office attendance. Will you require employees to be in the office a minimum of number of days per week or month? Will this be consistent across offices and departments, or varied? Be sure to consider your real estate strategy and related capacity constraints when making this decision.
Maximum days in-office: Inversely, if you’re “remote-first” (or even “remote-friendly”) you may actually want to cap office usage. Will you restrict days in the office for the organization? Do you want to have an “exception” protocol for allowing some folks to come in more often, but not enabling that as a norm? Figuring out those specifics can have a big impact on ensuring equitable employee situations. And just like with minimums, your real estate strategy is closely tied here.
Specific in-office days: One common plan I’ve heard in my research conversations is to have specific company and/or department “in-office” days. You might want to have everyone come in for company All-Hands meetings on Wednesdays. Or department leads might want to do something similar for team meetings. These may be weekly or periodic and will differ by organization. Keep in mind that these types of policies will be meaningful demonstrations of how you view the importance/value of in-office vs. remote work.
WFH eligibility: Despite a year of [mostly] successful remote work, employers still seem to think of flex/remote in the hybrid world as something to be earned. If your organization believes that there are performance or related standards required to maintain WFH eligibility, you’ll want to work through how your managers (and HR team) can set and enforce clear guidelines. For example, you might decide to add “in-office requirements” as a potential remediation in a Personal Improvement Plan (PIP).
Establish the role managers will play regarding in-office policies
Like most operational and HR policies, there is a balance to strike in what is communicated and enforced at a company level vs. at a department or manager level. Hybrid in-office guidelines are no different, and there are different ways to approach this.
Most companies I’ve spoken with plan to put managers into one of the following roles:
Policy-enforcers: The company / HR team establishes in-office and flex work requirements and protocols. They are determined centrally by leadership, communicated across the organization, and broadly applied across teams. The role of the manager is to enforce those guidelines, without ability to further restrict and/or loosen (e.g. managers cannot give additional WFH time). The upside of this approach is it helps ensure equality across teams and managers. The downside is that it is the least empowering for managers.
Policy-makers: Managers and department leaders are empowered to make team or department-level decisions on hybrid work. They can set team and even individual-level requirements and develop standards for determining in-office vs. flex schedules. The upside is to enable specific teams to adjust to their productivity needs (e.g. a Sales team believing in-office work is better for team development). The downside is the risk that each manager has a different approach, which can lead to inequity.
Policy-partners: This role balances the managers as both makers and enforcers of policy. The company may set general or baseline guidelines (e.g. very loose restrictions or strongly suggested behavior) and then enable managers to communicate those with some adaptation to team-specific considerations. This has the update of a more balanced organizational/team approach. The downside is that it risks additional complexity and requires extra communication to keep guidelines clear to employees.
Determine how you’ll approach vaccination requirements
Figuring out how to handle vaccination requirements as a company has proven to be - by far - the thorniest topic that has come up in my HR conversations. That’s not too surprising, as the conversation around vaccinations is like HR kryptonite: one part legal, one part politics, one part social pressure, one part health and safety, one part liability…the complexity goes on. It’s a difficult thing to work through for any organization.
Nonetheless, it’s something that is a huge factor in return planning. Below I’ve outlined the types of approaches companies can and are taking. I won’t get into the legal, HR, or other considerations in this article — those are very involved and need proper space for coverage. But, these approaches serve as good framing with respect to the operational stage of hybrid transitions.
Require vaccines to return to the office. As an organization, you decide to only allow people to come back into physical offices if they confirm they’ve been vaccinated. This greatly simplifies much of the health & safety planning, which is good. At the same time, it can lead to tense HR situations around how vaccine protocols relate to any in-office requirements for a particular job or person.
Encourage, but don’t require, vaccinations. Rather than limiting office entry to vaccinated folks only, you can decide to just encourage employees to get vaccinated as a benefit to your overall health and safety approach. This means you’ll need to decide how to address safety protocols for unvaccinated folks. Relatedly, you might also still want employees to let you know whether they’ve been vaccinated to improve and/or revise their employee experience (e.g. not being required to do temperature checks).
Identify without encouragement. If as a company you aren’t comfortable taking a stance to encourage vaccinations or for other reasons prefer not to, you can instead rely on opt-in identifications from employees. This gives you space to have more flexibility in your health and safety protocols without getting into the “for or against” difficulties.
Topic off-limits. Some companies have and will decide to just stay away from the vaccination topic altogether. No opinions, no identification, nothing. In this case, the key consideration is establishing “lowest common denominator” health and safety requirements, since you won’t be able to differentiate between employees that were or were not vaccinated. That may mean continuing strict protocols or taking risk on health and safety.
Firm up your plan for virtual hiring
Virtual hiring is one of the two key components of which flavor of hybrid your organization will pursue. So, you hopefully already have a baseline idea of whether you will or will not hire virtually, and how restrictive you’ll be on geography (e.g. local to an office or anywhere).
Now it’s time to take that several steps further. Recruiting transitions require meaningful upfront planning. Your recruiting leader(s) should start working through the operating plan for virtual hiring in detail.
That plan should likely include:
Communication of overall approach to virtual eligibility
Departmental / role-specific guidelines for what postings can be virtual
Clarity on who makes the decisions on whether a role is local or virtual by team
How you plan to staff and organize recruiters (on your team and 3rd parties)
Implications for any software you use or need to use to expand virtual scale
Updates to how / where you post and promote roles
Evolutions to how you build pipeline (e.g. targeting new universities or target companies in expanded geographies)
Start shaping your in-office vs. remote/WFH benefits
During COVID, many companies have reshaped benefits programs to support employees working from home. That may have been in the form of an equipment stipend, covering home internet costs, or even giving lunch allowances.
That was straightforward when everyone was in the same situation. But now, with the office reopening, you’ll have a wide variety of in-office / at-home behavior to account for. Your benefits strategy will get challenged, as you’ll want to dial back some investment while bringing online in-office benefits. And all the while, you’ll have to try to maintain an equitable offering across in-office, at home, and fully virtual employees.
There are a number of key questions you’ll need to work through with your Finance/Benefits leaders:
Which COVID-era benefits do you want to retain? What do you want to unwind?
What previous “in-office” benefits do you still want to offer (e.g. snacks, free lunch)? Which do you need to retire due to safety concerns? Which do you want to retire because, perhaps due to dynamic planning challenges?
What degree of in-office vs. at-home commitment or consistency will you require from employees to be able to effectively plan in-office purchases/benefits?
What differences will there be (if any) between WFH benefits for flex workers (e.g. those also coming to an office) vs. fully remote workers?
This list can get quite lengthy and there is not yet a “best in class” approach to take given this space is emerging in real time. Rather than feel pressure to figure this all out upfront, it may be more effective to prioritize the 3 - 5 considerations that are most relevant to your flavor of hybrid. Then, you can work out a process for considering / evaluating evolutions to your benefits offering as you return and really begin operating in the hybrid model.
Bonus: invest in software that will give you and your teams leverage!
By this point, you’re almost certainly feeling the weight of the many new operational considerations you’ll be working through as you transition to hybrid. There’s a lot, and after a long year of enabling remote work, the next transition can feel overwhelming.
Each of these operational streams will result in new work, tasks, responsibilities, and challenges for your teams. It’s likely most of that will find its way into disparate systems, spreadsheets, and other existing tools.
That may be manageable, for a while. But unless you have a “hybrid work manager” on your team [doubtful], it’s likely to get unwieldy for you and your team quickly. Plus, you’re going to want to be able to aggregate data, centralize tools, and give clear guidance to your operators and employees around how to navigate through this transition.
The good news is, new software is emerging to support you through the many stage journey that will be the transition to hybrid work. That software can be extremely flexible and will grow with you during the journey of hybrid work.
That software will address needs like:
Implementing safety protocols with symptom surveys and contact tracing
Powering daily team check-ins experiences and organizational reporting
Providing insight into who is actually coming in across your offices
Managing and enforcing capacity limitations
Enabling team coordination & scheduling capabilities to make coming to the office valuable for employees
Ensuring employee have a user-friendly experience to transition to hybrid work
Integrating with company rosters, HRIS systems, etc. to offer smarter programs
Of course, I think Scoop’s Workplace Planner is a great example of this type of offering and I expect a lot of continued innovation in this space.
In Part 3 next week, we’ll explore “the implementation stuff” where the nitty gritty becomes front-and-center during the home stretch to reopening.
Thanks for reading!
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