5 Tips for Moving Workers Back Into Your Office

After state-wide shut downs and work-from-home orders, many businesses are planning on bringing their workforce back into the office.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how to address this. How will workers readjust to the office environment after being at home for so long? How will we ensure employee safety?

In this article, we’ll go over 5 tips for moving workers back into your office.

1. Communicate employee safety

When it comes to moving your employees back into the office, workplace safety should be a number 1 priority.

Make sure your employees know you’re taking their safety seriously by implementing the following:

• Create a digital safety guide – This will ensure your workforce is sticking to specific safety guidelines you’ve put into place.
• Train employees before they come back – Providing digital training sessions before your workers come back is another great way to ensure that they’ll behave in a way that is safe to one another.

• Reinforce the message – 47% of employees say they don’t know what their company’s core values are. This means that messaging about workplace safety may also become forgotten over time. Reinforce the message with regular email updates and in-office digital signage.

2. If necessary, maintain lenient stay-at-home policies

Many employees may feel uneasy about returning to the office. Because of this, you may want to let them continue working at home if that’s where they feel most comfortable.

Because of this, you also want to make sure you maintain strong digital communication channels with your workforce. This will enable them to all communicate with one another regardless of whether they’re at home or at the office.

3. Maintain effective internal communication

If internal communication becomes ineffective, your employees may feel left in the dark, which can increase stress and decrease productivity.

To keep employees feeling safe and secure, make sure you take the time to address common questions. Even if it’s just through email, this can provide your staff with the piece of mind necessary to focus on their work.

4. Engage and motivate your employees

It’s easy for employees to become distracted by fears they may have about the virus and getting sick. This can be combated by making an effort to keep your employees engaged in the workplace.

While most most people prefer to work for smaller companies, even if you’re a big company, you can keep your employees engaged in a few ways:

• Encourage employees to share information, photos, or videos about their hobbies and interests inside internal communication channels.
• Create competitions for your employees to participate in to compete with one another, such as best work-from-home setup or most colorful mask design.

5. Stay up-to-date about workplace health standards

While a vaccine is on the way for the virus, it’s impossible to know yet how effective it will be. There may be sudden spikes of new cases in your area before this happens, leading to further work-from-home orders. Keep an eye on what information is shared from your public health department to keep your employees as safe as possible.

Conclusion

There you have it – 5 tips for safely moving your workforce back into the office!

Hopefully now you have some piece of mind when it comes to making this transition for your organization.

Do you have any tips for moving a workforce back into the office? Let me know in the comments!

Nicholas Rubright is a digital marketing specialist at Mvix – a company that provides digital signage to improve business communications. In his free time, Nicholas enjoys playing guitar, writing music, and building cool things on the internet.