As the world slowly creeps back to hints of normalcy, it’s important for corporates to prepare their staff to return to work and safely reopen offices. The way people traditionally operated is not the same anymore. And the story is the same when it comes to how organizations operate as well. As a result, once cannot expect the returning office staff to function as they did before the office closed over a year ago.
In this article, we take a look at the corporate space as a whole which seems to have experienced both highs and lows as a result of the global event from 2020-2021. We will also discuss the importance of digital training and preparedness to manage the lows that offices may face as they slowly start reopening. Moreover, we look at the steps to take and how to tread wisely by training employees themselves.
Some Questions That the Senior Management Must Ask Themselves Before Safely Reopening Their Offices
How To Guarantee the Safety and Safeguarding of Employees as They Return to Work?
As reopening of offices gains speed, guaranteeing the safety of the employees returning to work must gain speed as well.
If the senior management understands this, they should move towards taking the necessary steps much in advance. Sanitization and professional cleaning companies are expecting an increase in demand as workspaces reopen. However, how long can organizations afford to spend on professional cleaning services?
Rather, organization should prepare to ease their employee into the workplace as they return. And a good way to do this is by training and preparing them for the reopening.
Topics designed to deliberate on the importance of health and safety are perfect. By training at the source, organizations are almost guaranteeing that the need for expensive services are secondary at the most.
Digital training and preparedness are one-time investments for this situation. Compliance-based training, courses on managing workplace ethics, and best practices for returning employees are courses which can assist organizations to tackle the challenge of resuming work. This means training the employees to maintain a safe working environment for themselves and others.
How To Balance the New Hybrid Working Culture While Safely Reopening Offices?
We recently heard that Deloitte UK plans on permanently letting its staff work from home. While others have taken to completely reopening their doors. And some are in the middle of implementing a hybrid work policy. A model of working partly from home and partly from office.
This raises an important question – how do organizations plan on implementing this hybrid model? How will rotating departments interact with each other? Who will be allowed to work from home? How does the organization plan on implementing this? Most importantly, what is expected from the employees?
It is here that a little bit of education, information, and preparedness can assist organizations from facing difficulty further down-the-line. Mostly because a hybrid working model can be very beneficial to the employee’s mental health and the organization’s overall productivity.
So organizations can start by defining the policies that will govern this hybrid model. Subsequently, it is important to set the basis on which this hybrid opportunity is awarded to employees. And also determine what the organization expects from them.
The initial switch to working from home was not simple either. eLearning and training did play a role in helping employees make this switch. But even in that case, we were talking about a group of people doing the same thing together. However, when you talk about a hybrid model, it is still unclear as to what the challenges could arise when people are shuffling between work and home. As a result, some training and preparedness is very important before this kicks in.
Are We Prepared for Uncertainty and Dealing with Slowdown in Business and Recruitment?
Here’s a predicament. We all know that recruitment has slowed down. In fact, downsizing staff has been in the news as well. This is where organizations are left wondering about some serious questions. Is it wise to start rehiring? Or is it smarter to keep operations at a minimum? The future appears uncertain, demand appears uncertain, and so it’s difficult to take a confident decision.
Whether companies decide to hire new employees, or they decide to keep resources low in order to compensate for the future, the need to train and develop in both case is present.
If new employees are hired and are working remotely, the need to onboard them with pace and scale will stay. We already know about the importance of digital training when it comes to remote onboarding and onboarding new employees in general.
However, what we need to speak about are the organizations which continue to work with a lean work force.
In this case, the workload will and has significantly increased on the lean work force that these organizations are maintaining. Such organizations need to quickly upskill and help their retained employees cope and achieve more .
This is where digital training is helping again, and its contribution cannot be taken lightly. Not only are the retained staff rapidly upskilled but digital training is helping some destress as well. The idea of running on a lean work force can arise from other insecurities as well, like diminishing demand for a certain service or clients choosing to roll back on their projects. As a result, organizations need to approach the problem more conservatively and assist the existing staff in doing more with less.
What About the Diminished Ability to Travel?
Let’s keep aside the objective of safely reopening offices. Another challenge is the inability to travel anywhere. Whether it be for expert visits to vendor locations, or training new international divisions, or even visiting prospecting customers and partnerships. These functions were usually driven by visiting experts who’d physically arrive and create some kind of partnership or arrangement that would benefit all parties involved.
Needless to say, with travel restrictions still in place around the world, the next best way to deliver this expertise to locations where people can’t visit is by delivering expertise remotely. Now organizations have multiple ways to approach this delivery of expertise. Either remote sessions or packaged training content will work. And if we look at the sales and business relationship development, there’s no doubt that many could use some training on how to remotely increase and maintain corporate relations as well.
Even in the case of visiting vendor locations or supplier facility visits, the only visible option for now is devising digital training and deploying it at multiple stages.
Concluding
At eNyota, we work on designing the best possible digital training and preparedness solutions for a range of industries and clients. In our 14+ years of operations, we have assisted multiple organizations overcome the hurdle of training and development. We can assist you in planning and safely reopening offices using training and informative content before you even start. Get in touch with us at contactus@enyotalearning.com or fill this form and we’ll back to you!
