Heading Back to the Office: An Employee's Guide

Many businesses are preparing to transition employees back to offices, either to alleviate the stress of isolation or simply to stay financially afloat.  Whatever the reason, keeping employees safe means employers must overcome a variety of hurdles, including adhering to new health and safety regulations that will likely include all-new considerations like contact tracing and keeping employees properly distanced using space management tools.

Even established business processes, especially people-centric vectors like human resources (HR) will need to adapt new solutions, such as building a hybrid staffing model using remote workforce management tools. That's a considerable challenge for most employers, but it's not the only challenge. Employees, too, need to adjust their perspectives carefully when considering a return to the office. That means taking a close look at every part of the work day from resuming a daily commute to where and exactly how you intend to perform work in a new kind of office population.

Before even thinking about the office, consider that the best place to start is whether you want to go back to work at all. If working at home suits you, then the best way to pitch this shift to your employer is to not just ask, but ask with a plan. Work with HR on exactly how a shift to working entirely from home would work and explore available tools and technologies to find new ways to help. Most employers are more receptive to this concept than they've ever been, especially to a "hybrid" work scenario where employees work partly at home and partly in the office.

If a return to work, even just a partial return, is in your immediate future, then it's in your best interest to be as involved with your employer's planning process as possible. Find out who is on point for organizing the office re-opening and be sure to discuss the following issues with them.

Getting in the Door

A PricewaterhouseCoopers study cited by Statista (see above graphic), shows that when it comes to re-opening office space during the pandemic, 81 percent of companies plan to change workplace safety measures and requirements while 78 percent aim to reconfigure work sites to promote physical distancing. Additionally, 54 percent of businesses plan to make remote work a permanent option for roles that allow it, and 53 percent of businesses are looking at changing shifts or alternate crews to reduce exposure.

That means that Return-to-Work (RTW) strategies will not only have a drastic effect on your current work environment once you return, exactly what those effects are will also vary widely for different organizations, since measures will be dependent on different considerations, including the kind of work being done, the characteristics of the space, the size of the employee population, and what new COVID-19 health regulations that apply to your state and municipality.

Expect stringent constrains on which office locations will be accessible, the number of employees allowed on site at any given time, as well as new staff and procedures to allow for new measures, like contact tracing and disinfecting work between shifts. Offices will also need to provide employees Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as masks, face shields, gloves, and a steady supply of disinfectant and hand sanitizers. Employees need to be sure they understand which measures are being applied, what the procedures are to implement them, and where and how they are to collect any new equipment necessitated for safety.

Access control will be a particularly annoying problem for employees who are unprepared. That's because this process will be how employees are screened and allowed to enter the workplace, likely now a multi-step process that will often involve an online reservation system and even some kind of smart token. This sounds complex, but access control is critical in screening contagious employees, as well as determining who is on site at any given time. That's why not only employers but also local COVID-19 authorities and municipal regulations are placing such special emphasis on this process.

Most access processes will go something like this: Before leaving their homes, employees will need to verify they are not feeling any symptoms through a wellness check, possibly through a mobile app, or a return to work tool, like Zoho BackToWork. They will then be expected to proceed to a screening area upon arriving, where their temperatures will be taken before granting them access to their work area. That access will then only be granted if the employee has a valid reservation waiting in the system. If that's not a problem, the employee will be given access to the office using a smart card or similar token used to confirm time of entry and exit as well as where that employee will spend most of the work day.

Especially at the beginning, failure to meet any of these requirements will likely result in your being sent home, so it's important to work with your employer's RTW team to make sure you fully understand the process and have all the required apps and tokens.

Commuting Concerns

Ironically, one of the most problematic RTW concerns for employees isn't the office, it's getting to the office. Commuting to work in your own car is one thing, but using public transportation, an unavoidable situation in many locations, has many employees very worried. After close to a year of general isolation, it will take some convincing for many employees to return to their daily train, bus, or subway commutes.

"Employers have done a good job making sure offices are safe and sanitized with protocols to keep them that way. But since public transportation remains the primary mode of getting employees to the office, safety is an entirely new challenge," said Dave Bryant, vice president at One Workplace, a leading commercial interiors company in the Bay Area. "Giving employees alternatives and safer ways to get to work, like corporate buses, and ride sharing services, that have cleaning protocols, are options employers should consider getting workers to and from work safely."

"Space-as-a-Service (SPaaS) is a rising trend that lets many companies customize smaller office spaces located closer to where their employees live," says Bryant. Locating new space closer to these employee hubs will not only reduce commute times, according to Bryant, but also change commuting requirements and provide a safe place away from the bigger office when work doesn’t require employees to be there.

Again, if you're looking at a return to work, address this issue with your employer and see if any of these solutions might work for your company.

Expect New Technology

We've mentioned new access control technology above, but for many employees, that won't be the only new tech they bump into when returning to the office during the pandemic. For example, Cisco says its carefully considered what return to work means for employees in its offices.

"We've increased the number of sensors we have in in our conference room hardware," said Jeetu Patel, SVP and GM security and application division at Cisco. He said the company is adding various sensors to its conference solution hardware, "that can sense the number of participants in a room, measure the temperature and humidity levels, and even gauge air quality." Cisco and employers like it will be collecting this kind of facilities data in new ways and specifically for the purposes of ensuring that employees remain safe while on-site.

Cisco's Webex Room Navigators, which are office touch panels that provide instant connections to video conferences, room controls, content sharing, and room booking are now voice activated. "You can just walk into a room and say 'Hey Webex, I'm going to join the meeting.' The system has proximity controls that will be able to identify participants [via their] smartphones using ultrasound," Patel said.

He adds that moving towards voice assistants in the office now has the added benefit of being a more sanitary solution, since fewer surfaces need to be physically touched. And, of course, there are plenty of additional benefits that will continue to help workers even after the pandemic, such as intelligent room booking, lighting and blinds adjustment, as well as automatic access to smart screens and other conferencing technology.

Rethinking Employee Benefits

Employee perks and benefits are important factors for employees considering one job or workplace over another. In pre-COVID times, perks like free meals and snacks, open concept lounges, gym memberships, as well as company happy hours and outings, all helped attract employees and even kept them in offices longer. Those perks and benefits may no longer be as enticing or make sense for remote workers or employees coming back to offices.

"The shift back to the physical workplace brings some big considerations around the types of perks and benefits employers offer their people," says Jordan Peace, co-founder and CEO of Fringe, a lifestyle benefits company.

"Months of remote work have forced companies to rethink the types of benefits they offer employees. Many in-office perks like gym memberships, ping pong tables, or catered lunches have basically become obsolete overnight," says Peace. In their place a new category has emerged, one of lifestyle perks. These kinds of perks are aimed at alleviating the problems many employees face as a result of working from home. They generally take the form of a digital marketplace of sorts where employees can select from apps or services that meet their immediate needs for things like virtual tutoring or food delivery.

Peace said that a survey of Fringe users found that 80 percent of employees felt the remote work-era permanently changed the way they look at benefits; 84 percent said they believe that lifestyle perks will be more valuable in a post-COVID world than in-office perks and amenities, even after the return to the office.

While Fringe helps companies implement this kind of program as a service, many businesses will be challenged with how to offer these kinds of pandemic perks to their employees. An excellent way to become involved with your company's RTW efforts is to work with HR and other employees to identify what effective benefits solutions in your area might be and then work up a plan for how to deliver them.

Communication Is Key

Most RTW software tools and platforms place a heavy emphasis on employee communication. After all, companies returning to work are facing significant changes to almost every aspect of how they do business. That can't be accomplished simply by sending memos. Employers need to foster active discussions between managers and employees to make this transition successful and safe. That also means new levels of involvement from employees, however.

Even with multiple new channels of communication open, including new online meetings as well as team messaging apps and similar measures, many employees still sit back and simply "collect" new information without participating in the surrounding discussions. If you're on the short list to head back to your office, it pays to become involved with these talks. That means not only speaking up, but often speaking about topics you might have avoided previously. A key example is mental health.

"Business leaders need to accept that new cultural norms will emerge from this crisis. Many of the adjustments so far have shown the resiliency of workers and organizations to adapt to change. But one tough question we still need to answer is how do these changes in our work environments affect the mental health of our employees? How are they doing as people? And that’s going to take some real follow-up and connection," says Mike Bokina, Vice President and Head of Human Resources, Siemens USA. "We need to continue to address the human aspect of this crisis, not just the financial aspect. What do employees need? Cultural norms are changing, and employee voices need to be a part of that."

Uncertain times makes communication with employees more critical than ever, but that discussion needs to go in both directions. Beyond regular all-hands meetings and virtual town halls, maintaining one-on-one connections with a distributed workforce can help sustain employee engagement, which has waned during this time of remote work.

"For us at Siemens USA, which has 50,000 employees, that has meant transparency on topics ranging from the health of the employees, the health of the organization and business, to the health of the communities Siemens operates in," Bokina said.

Fostering these kinds of discussions, even if it's just with other employees, is an important new element in returning to work safely. If you're having difficulty finding the right forum in your organization to have these talks, consider working with HR to create one. Both your employer and your co-workers will benefit.