For organizations, while business continuity has been a challenge and a great focus area, the force behind business continuity is our people. Thus like everything, it is imperative that we proactively address the possible/ real concerns plaguing our people.
In our living history, COVID -19 is an unprecedented crisis. Individuals, societies, and economies globally couldn’t fathom something like this to hit them. The ramifications of this are long-drawn and will impact all, irrespective even if we aren’t at the front and center of it.
For organizations, while business continuity has been a challenge and a great focus area, the force behind business continuity is our people. Thus like everything, it is imperative that we proactively address the possible/ real concerns plaguing our people.
1) Voice of Employee: It is all the more important to be connected to your people in this virtual environment. Before you plan anything or start rolling out initiatives, hearing what your employee needs is critical. It might just surprise you.
2) Infrastructure Support: None of us had planned home office set-ups, from the right table to an ergonomic chair or something as necessary as high-speed broadband weren’t necessities. Organizations can evaluate creative ways of supporting some of these.
3) COVID Care: Ensure best practices for sanitization and safety of those coming to office is a must. A step ahead could be supporting affected individuals and families from testing to help with hospitalization if needed. Some of these are beyond the scope of an organization, but such support would only garner positive support from all employees and talk about the organization’s ethos.
4) Wellness: Individual wellness is at an all-time low. Physical movement has reduced considerably; social- in-person interaction has stopped. The office, our colleagues, and friends used to be a source of social- interaction. Most organizations also focused heavily on physical well-being with facilities like in-house gyms or fitness classes in various forms from yoga, Zumba, capoeira to many others. In current times advertising more about your EAP partners, conversations around mental health, and again creative solutions for gamified physical wellness are critical.
5) Time- Off: An important fact to take action around is that across organizations, the leaves taken by individuals has dropped significantly, and this is as drastic as up to 95% in some cases. Also, we already know that very few teams are disciplined to follow a start and end time. For the rest, there is checking emails from the moment you wake up to the time you go to sleep. Mandating leaves and schedules around work timings would not only help teams’ detox but also it would surely enhance productivity and ideation.
While these are a few immediate term measures, there is a strong need to utilize this time and plan for the long term. Whether it be planning for work from home, bringing in returning mothers or retired specialists, inducting a large part of the GIG workforce, and building work from anywhere model, the list of possibilities is endless. We have once a lifetime opportunity to take the lead and shape the future of work, and we must make the best of it.
