Considerations for the Return to Office — Engati Blog

The lockdowns triggered by the virus have put the world economy in a bad state. Many businesses have pulled down their shutters, never to raise them again.

It’s quite obvious that businesses are longing to resume operations. They waiting to re-open their doors. Employees are concerned about losing their jobs to the crisis, but are also worried about their health.

But, there seems to be no end to the pandemic in sight till a vaccine is invented, manufactured in the billions and made available for everyone to be inoculated. And, with the onset of monsoons in many countries, the reaction of the virus is yet to be determined.

Any business planning a return-to-office needs to take a lot of things into consideration.

There’s a lot of changes that we’re going to have to make- both regarding our infrastructure and our mindsets.

We, at the Engati Chatbot Platform wanted to help out. We wanted to create a guide for businesses to make these changes.

And so, we wrote a comprehensive e-book, addressing everything that we felt should be taken into consideration while framing a plan to re-open our offices in a safe manner.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

You need to create a business continuity plan and appoint an owner for that plan. You’re also going to need to create a Rapid Response Team or a task force.

Here are a few important things to keep in mind:

Update: Brush up your business continuity plan

Test: Invoke a full test of continuity operations if you did not get a chance to do so before operations went into lockdown

Complete contact lists: Location, primary residence, phone, email, public email, social tags, status and rejoining dates, any status on issues faced or provisions needed

Determine the location of employees: Determine where individual employees are and how they plan to come back

Invoke call trees: Run tests on call trees for simulated emergency response

Ensure customer support lines are open: Customers will help bring back the business, plan around customer service readiness and procedures to engage

A positive case determination: Run scenarios for evacuation and medical emergency notifications if a case is tested positive

Medical contingency and evac: Add and reinforce your medical contingency procedures resulting in an evac plan activation procedures to your BCP plan

Planning the re-opening

You can’t let everyone go in at the same time. That’d be a recipe for disaster.

So, who goes in first?

Engati recommends an operational criticality approach with the following order of decreasing priority.

Adjusting to the new normal

The standard operating manual of the entire organization will need to be recalibrated to adjust to the new normal.

Here are a few important considerations:

The hiring imperative

Hiring will be key to grow out. Of course this is after the knee jerk reaction to slashing costs has been completed and short term layoff cycles. Hire selective, the talent wars might be cooling down since the brakes on all types of economic growth has been so sudden.

Talent might be available at a reasonable cost since market opportunities will be limited.

Businesses who survive and come out stronger, with long term vision, operating in growth markets and with stability will attract the best talent.

The employee engagement imperative

You will find people being more productive when connected from home since work distractions are fewer

Give them buffer time to walk around or run errands between meetings.

Care with connect and listening to them will become more important as you focus on employee centricity.

Asking their opinions on issues and resolutions or changes will keep them engaged. They will feel they have a voice and are not forgotten since they are not in close proximity to walk over to leadership or attend meetings in person.

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