by Joe Blattner | January 29, 2021
As businesses partially or fully reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic, they face the extraordinary challenge of convincing their employees it’s safe to come back to work. Covid has affected everyone in different ways, and while some employees are excited to come back, others feel overwhelmed by the prospect. Here are some ways to encourage your employees to get them to resume work.
1. Reassure Your Employees
Many employees are anxious and fearful about going back to work, fearing that they may contract the virus. You can reassure them by letting them know what plans and measures you’ve put in place to keep them safe at work. Tools like CleanRated can help. Safety measures may include:
- Implementing employee health screening procedures
- Establishing social distancing measures like restructuring workstations
- Providing personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks, face shields, hand sanitizers, and gloves
- Providing disinfectant wipes to employees
- Having workspaces deep cleaned every day
- Developing a response plan for employee exposure
2. Embrace Flexible Working Schedules
If your employees have been working at home, coming back to work full-time can prove challenging to some. To make it easy, you can have your employees split their time working remotely and at the office during the week. You can also introduce staggered shifts, where employees have a different start, break and finish times. You may have a certain number of employees come in every day or have others come early or late. This can help ease congestion at the workplace so you can better keep your employees safe.
3. Provide Emotional and Mental Support
In the wake of the Covid crisis, many employees are struggling with re-entry anxiety. This refers to the dread employees may feel about returning to work during a pandemic. You need to show your employees that you care about their mental and emotional well-being. You can do this by providing mental health and wellness services to your employees at no charge to them. Cover their visits to telehealth mental health professionals or web-based meditation classes.
4. Offer Childcare Assistance
With many schools and child care centers closed, working parents are faced with hard choices regarding their children’s care. You can help your employees by offering childcare assistance in the form of virtual or in-home childcare. Knowing that their children will be taken care of can motivate your employees to come to work. You can also allow parents to have flexible work schedules if you can’t provide childcare assistance. You can work with parents to come up with flexible arrangements like shifting hours so they can come in early or late.
5. Keep Open Communication
You need to keep your communication open and transparent. Communicate clearly and often using multiple channels to avoid misinformation. When conveying safety-related messages, also include an inspiring message to keep up their spirits. Express empathy to your employees and your appreciation for their services.
Show your employees that you care about them and let them know that management is willing to listen and address any issues where possible. Provide channels to freely express their concerns, such as via the HR, manager, or a safety committee. When employees know that superiors hear their voice and their needs and concerns are met, they will be more comfortable returning to work.
6. Change Your Policies
If you don’t provide family medical leave, paid sick leave, medical insurance, or hazard pay, you might want to start doing so now. Your employees are dealing with a lot, and providing these incentives can go a long way in getting them to come back to work.
Conclusion
It’s important to acknowledge that this is a difficult time and your employees are scared of returning to work. To get them to come back to work, you need to show them that you care about their safety and that you’ve taken steps to protect them. You also need to provide them additional support like mental health services, childcare assistance, and paid sick leave.
It’s also important to make sure employees know what they are getting with your company. A total compensation statement, like those offered by COMPackage.com, can an employee see how generous the company has been in terms of the value of the many benefits (obvious, and not-so-obvious) you provide.
by Joe Blattner | May 12, 2020
It’s likely that for the next 9 to 24 months, social distancing will become the standard that we will all need to learn to live by. The New Normal. What might this look like in the workplace?
Depending on what your company does, and how many of those functions work, it will be different. But no one will want to work on top of others near term if they don’t have to. Not until this virus is eradicated. Not until it’s gone!
So, companies are going to have to think differently. What are the opportunities presented by this New Normal? I’ve got a couple of ideas for you.
One is a new take on an old idea, namely “shifting.” This is where, in order to maintain more distance from coworkers by having fewer people in the office, people come and leave in shifts. Even if you’re just going to be open from nine to five, you might have some people working in the office for a half day and at home the other half. Or you might have some people come into the office on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and some come in on Tuesday and Thursday.
And while this is not possible for all staff, or all circumstances, anything that can increase productivity, while thinning out workplace congregation will help. Then social distancing at work may have a better chance of working.
Then there’s another perspective to consider: employees, including some of your best employees, who no longer want to come to work because of fear of COVID-19. This might become a larger issue. They want to work at home as often as they can so that they can control their own social distancing requirement.
So, allow me to propose this concept: a formula for work–at–home compensation that might improve productivity – even after the threat of the virus has gone.
First, let’s take stock. Not all employees are great employees. In fact, if you follow many business theories, as I do:
- 20% of our workforce is GREAT! True performers.
- 60% of our workforce are at least not bad. They get the job done. You wouldn’t want to fire them, but when they say they are leaving, you say, “Ok. Best to you”, and probably replace them with someone better if the market will allow.
- And the remaining 20% are those that you should be looking to replace anyway but are too lazy to do so.
The other insight I want to suggest, is that “full productivity” in my past experience as a business owner, is about 65%. If I can get 65% of true quality output out of an employee in a 40-hour week, that’s an employee that I made money on. Around 20% of my employees could produce north of 80%. Roughly 60% of my employees top 50%. Some 20% of my employees can seldom get to 50% productivity.
In my day, I used to always say that what we do from 9:00 – 5:00 covers our costs, and real profits were made in the time spent beyond that, time spent working beyond a 40-hour week. But your numbers are unique to your business. And how to measure some things are often impossible in a work from home situation.
So, here’s the idea:
While the average salary in America today is $56,000 (and change), for simplicity sake, let’s use $100,000 so that we all can follow along easier. Then you can apply a real salary to a real employee in your own situation.
Evaluate what they do that’s measurable and what they do that’s not. Maybe half their job is not measurable but half is. So, 20 hours a week they perform tasks that have to get done or it just backs up. They know it, and you know it. But, there’s no measurable value to it.
We all have it. But, as a business owner, we pay them to do it. Filing, going to the bathroom, cleaning off their desk, sitting in a staff meeting, reading email memo’s, catching up on company business, walk-around management / business socialization. Stuff! You can’t get around it.
So, working from home, you could thereby change their base to $50,000 (50%) to do all the non-measurable stuff.
Now, for things they do that make you money. Those tasks that, if your people could do more of, you could pay them more – in a win-win way. Get out more essential reports. Serve more customer issues. Output more revenue-generating work – or help their manager output more revenue-generating work.
For the measurable tasks, the stuff that they do for the primary part of their job half the time, pay them more per function when they output more, and less when they output less. You figure out the numbers per the situation.
The outcome: people working from home will focus more on the important work because they earn more, even while they’re still responsible for the non-measurable tasks.
You might need a few less people, because people will focus on performance-based output, and less on business socialization. Some will cry foul because now they earn less. You look at those situations, and conclude which ones you either change the formula, or change the employee. Both are worth the evaluation.
The New Normal is not going away soon. People will insist to stay out of harm’s way, or you will want your people to stay out of harm’s way. You just need to rethink compensation to make it all happen in a profitable manner.
What do you think?
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Category: COVID-19