In July 2020, as some organizations first considered reopening workspaces that had closed due to COVID-19, Leading Edge released Reopening Our Workspaces: A Playbook. Its focus was on the human side of reopening: how can organizations ensure that people are supported (and feel supported), and that team culture moves forward instead of backwards during a return to the workplace?
As of this writing (June 2021), public health and regulatory conditions are leading to a much wider variety of organizations considering reopening. As these discussions unfold, it is clear that for many organizations, the status quo pre-pandemic is not the goal. Rather, we have heard leaders and talent professionals say that they are trying to answer the question: What model of a workplace should our organization create?
We recognize that some organizations do need to answer this question. Staff at JCCs, Camps, Day schools, and other service providers, need to work in-person to perform their jobs, and therefore these organizations have fewer options. Other organizations that worked remotely even before the start of the pandemic have no plans to shift away from that.
This article is geared toward organizations that were asking employees to come into a workplace most or all working days, but then shifted to remote work when the pandemic began. Without supplanting Reopening Our Workspaces, which covers many other aspects of reopening, this article addresses more deeply the issues and models at play around what a workplace can be.
As you decide whether to ask your people to return to your workplace, to continue working remotely, or to move to a hybrid model, here are some questions to help frame your decision-making process.
When determining how your organization will move forward regarding remote work versus in-person work, it is not necessarily an either/or decision; there are a variety of approaches that fit somewhere in between a fully remote organization and the traditional in-person 9-to-5 model. All options are not right for every organization, depending on the answers to the questions above as well as an organization’s size, type, and needs. However, they may provide an appropriate or sufficient compromise. We have summarized some of these options below.
David Goott is a former Program Manager at Leading Edge.
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Decisions about reopening a workspace are about more than hand sanitizer. They affect team culture, how people work together, and how the work happens.
As remote and hybrid work arrangements continue, organizations still need guidance on how to manage workers remotely and encourage employee engagement.
Create a fun and effective virtual onboarding experience.