We acted quickly and independently to send many of our team members home. Thankfully gallant and brave parts of our workforce remained in place to deliver essential services in healthcare, distribution, groceries, emergency services, and other industries. We thanked them and must continue to do so.
For many however we published the notices to begin to work from home and we dutifully shared tips on the best way to be productive and efficient in a new work from home environment. If we were doing what we should, we sent clear empathetic messages to all our stakeholders that our collective health was the most important thing.
The reality is people largely left willingly. Despite the multitudes of conflicting information at all levels of government, people are smart, and they understood the risks. Now we must ask, are we prepared for them to return? Will they have trust and confidence in our companies and cultures to accept the risk of a return to work?
In short, our greatest challenge as leaders and communicators wasn’t helping people exit the buildings in the beginning of this crisis, it will be building enough confidence for them that it is safe to return. It’s not too early for crisis response teams to be building this plan.
What should we all be considering? Here are some starter thoughts for your planning:
- People will need to return to work but they will want to know it is safe and that companies put the personal safety of every stakeholder first.
- Many large companies were retrenching on distributed workforce concepts prior to the crisis-some may find they liked working from home-what is your approach going forward?
- News reports currently suggest mass screening and testing will need to be widely available before people can return. In the US our testing response has not met demand so far. Will it going forward? Will it differ by geography therefore impacting rates of return for different facilities and locations?
- Workplaces even if “virus-free” may require sanitizing procedures to instill confidence for employees-are supplies readily available now? Will they be in time for your return to work notifications?
- Will external systems that support your employee base be ready such as childcare, eldercare, transportation, and other essential services? These will certainly vary by geography.
- Policies and practices that exist for attendance may need to be reviewed-how will you enforce compliance with a potentially hesitant workforce?
- In the US, governments at the state level are demonstrating autonomy in decision making and there is no clear Federal appetite for orders over guidance-return to work notifications will be just as dependent upon state and local officials as the shelter-in-place orders were.
These are just a few of the questions we need to begin to wrestle with as leaders in corporate crisis response. There are many, many more. We must begin to ask and plan now in order to anticipate our ability to begin to return people to work, to restart economic sectors that have been damaged by the crisis.
What questions are you asking in your crisis response war room? How will you be prepared to communicate them? This will likely be a lumpy process requiring the sound judgement and agility of every critical decision maker at your crisis table.