Leaders have a choice in how to welcome employees back to work after extended time off for Covid-19. You can focus on the necessities, or add a people plan. You can resume operations one of 3 ways –
- Fast ramp-up – believing the best thing for employees and the company is to make up for lost time
- Return to normal – same work schedules, assignments, and goals as before
- Slow ramp-up – understanding it may take time for people to adjust, to get back up-to-speed, and be comfortable their work environment is safe
No matter which re-start pace you choose, there will be employees who are good with it and others who are not. That’s because people react to things differently, especially traumatic events in their lives. That’s why it’s important to add a People Plan to your RTW planning.
The Covid Trauma
The covid pandemic has been a traumatic experience for everyone. Whether you’ve been called on to continue work through this time, asked to stay home and work remotely, or you were required to stay home to care for children or loved ones, every person has been affected in some manner.
Everyone has been changed by the covid pandemic.
There is an emerging narrative across the United States: We are going to emerge from this period of social distancing as better people. The goals are as endless as New Year’s Resolutions: we are going to learn gratitude, to improve our relationships, learn new skills, spend more time with our families, lose weight, exercise more and the list goes on.
Post-Trauma Growth
Let’s face it, emerging immediately from this time wiser, fitter, more loving and refreshed is pretty unlikely. That’s not how post-traumatic growth works for most people. Growth being the key word.
Everyone has grown through this experience. The form that growth takes depends in large part on our resiliency.
Resiliency Factor
People cope differently with traumatic events based on their level of resiliency –
- Highly resilient people likely view the pandemic and time at home as an opportunity to grow, to take on new challenges, learn new skills and make lasting changes in their lives
- Less resilient people likely live every day of the pandemic in fear, hoarding food and supplies, over-protecting their families
Chances are virtually 100% your workforce is a mix of highly resilient and less resilient employees. There’s a benefit to a diversity of resiliency among any group – we need high-resiliencers to see the bright side and reach for new opportunities, and we also need the lower resiliencers to take measures to be protective or defensive. We’re not rendering judgement about people based on their resiliency.
Your People Plan
The important thing to recognize is we all grow from living through traumatic experiences. Without getting too deep in psychobabble, post traumatic growth will cause people to react in new ways as they return to the workplace.
- Highly resilient people – likely don’t want to “go back” to pre-covid normal work. Resilient people look forward, focusing on what’s next in their lives. These people will push back if told that return to work means returning to exactly the same conditions, the same policies, the same responsibilities.
- Less resilient people – more likely want a return to normal work. However, these folks are likely to have felt more stress during the stay-home period, and won’t react well to being pressured to perform as they did prior to the covid experience.
Your people plan for returning to work can take the Lockdown style or the Liberate style.
Return to Work – Lockdown style
Face it, resuming your firm’s operations won’t be “normal” no matter what.
Chances are employees will face new procedures for entering your facility, working, gathering, eating, meeting and all the rest.
New policies and procedures will feel for many like the same sort of “lock down” they experienced during social distancing at home. It won’t be fun, it won’t be work as normal. It’ll feel like anything but normal.
Imagine how employees will feel that first day at work when they’re required to sit (or more likely stand 6 feet apart) through a meeting that’s boring as can be with someone explaining a laundry-list of new policies and procedures everyone will be told to conform with.
That makes work feel like a police state, something we Americans rebel against!
Return to Work – Liberate style
Instead of a lock-down return to work, imagine if you welcome every employee back liberate-style – starting out with personally thanking every individual for staying safe and healthy to help the company return to health. Instead of a meeting to review new procedures, you invite them to a special event to share with each other what everyone experienced through the time away.
Like elementary school days, we had fun sharing what we did over the Summer on the first day back at school. There was no school work, it was a social time. It felt great to see our friends again and swap stories. Imagine building that kind of energy for your company’s first day back to work!
Liberate Special Event
What if you built a special event for your employees? Invite them to a social day back to work, and offer them the chance to swap stories about their experiences during the pandemic.
Celebrate the return to work by giving every employee a chance to share what he or she experienced, what they learned, and what look forward to next.
What if instead of giving every employee a Return to Work Policy manual, you gave them a 1-page Idea card, something like the one shown here?
BOTTOM LINE: The choice is yours… you can put procedures or people first. If you’re a people-first kind of person and want help building your one-of-a-kind People Plan, reach out to us – we’ll be glad to help.
