Post-COVID-19 Return: Steps to Increase Efficiency

As quarantine measures are gradually lifted, businesses and employees are gradually starting to return back to the office and adjusting to the new reality. As you are planning your transition, be sure to take into account that this will be a long-term process that will last well into next year, according to a report by Forrester. Since we are currently at the beginning of the process, it is very important to plan out the steps you will take to get everybody working from one location again. If you mess up at the very start, it could cause serious complications down the road as far as retaining talent is concerned since people tend to remember the bad things more than the good ones.

In order to help you make the transition back to office work, we compiled a list of steps you can take to make sure the transition is a smooth one.

Start By Bringing Back Essential Personnel

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to bring back everybody right away since this will cause a health risk for your employees. Instead, you should consider which people you absolutely need to have in the office. Start by calling in the cleaning personnel. They can properly sanitize the office in preparation for a limited number of employees to start coming in. Then you can start bringing back your IT personnel since they need to set up all of the workstations and get your enterprise software up and ready to go.

Think back to when the crisis first started and you started sending everybody home. The last personnel who left back then should be the first ones coming back. Try using such a reverse order when making the transition back to the office.

Make Sure the New Office Rules are in Place

In the foreseeable future, you can say goodbye to attending client events or even shaking hands with each other. Make sure all of the social distancing rules are clearly stipulated and followed at all times. This includes making sure that all of the workstations have the necessary distance between them and hand sanitizers are always present in the office. If you have visitors coming to the office, it is a good idea to conduct temperature checks. Nowadays there are all kinds of technologies such as heat-detection cameras that can quickly detect if someone is running a fever.

Team meetings and events should also be limited in the number of people who are attending. As the past couple of months have shown us, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype and other communication apps are a great substitute for in-person meetings.

Have a Plan in the Event of a Second Wave

We already mentioned that you should leave some of your employees working remotely and that’s a good way to prepare the second wave of infections if it occurs. We always need to remember that some employees are vulnerable, others might be living with people who are at a higher risk, while some people simply enjoy working remotely. Keeping a certain part of your workforce at home will give you the flexibility to switch back to working from home in the event that quarantine measures will be put back in place.

In addition, you should use this time to make sure that your technology infrastructure is in order. Since some companies were unprepared for remote work, now is a good time to learn from your mistakes and makes sure everything is in place in the event that offices will be closed again. Having such an agile infrastructure will serve you well even beyond the COVID-19 crisis. Before the virus sent everybody home, remote work was viewed as a luxury. Now a lot of businesses have to come to realize that the majority of jobs can be done remotely.

Work Will Never Be the Same

The way we work is never going to be the same. When you hear people talking about returning to business as usual, this will be in a new reality that we live in. Mindy Support has been following all of the recommendations and safety precautions from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and other health organizations. During the remote work period, we continue to sanitize all of the surfaces and workstations. When quarantine measures started to be lifted we had a plan to gradually start bringing people back, but we also made sure that mentally they were ready to come back.

We also used this time to optimize our recruiting and processes to make sure everything is more efficient and will continue to do so in the future. All of our processes are aligned and in place to make sure our clients are pleased.

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin