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A Guide to Back To The Office

Remote working quickly became the new norm and now, with new information and medical advancements pertaining to the pandemic arising every day, a lot of us are dealing with having to go back to the office.

Going back to the office can be an anxiety-inducing thought for anyone. For business owners, the uncertainty of the future and the present pressure of ensuring a safe working environment for their workforce can be a daunting responsibility. For employees, having to leave the safety of their homes to return to the uncertainty of in-office working can cause significant stress and apprehension.

Whether you are a business leader or an employee, we have some great tips to help you ease back into the office space. It begins with communication across the organisation, then shifts to adapting to and adopting the necessary safety and prevention measures, and then lastly keeping abreast of what works and what needs to change.

Assess the environment

For a business owner, your first step is assessing your office environment to determine what is needed to ensure your workers’ safety in the workplace. Does your type of business require your employees to work closely together like at a construction site? Are there communal areas that will need more strict monitoring? What are the needs of your business, and how long should you wait before returning to the office after Covid?

The answers to these questions are largely determined by the type of organisation you run. The needs of your business such as how many employees need to be in the office to achieve productivity goals will influence how you develop your return to the office plan and serve as a guideline for how you should proceed.

Ensure your people are cared for

To work effectively and be productive, employees need to maintain their well-being, physically, emotionally, and mentally.

Adjusting and adapting during the pandemic took its toll in many ways, mentally being one of the most significant ones. Encourage your team to seek out support services to help support their mental well-being, because an unwell employee or one who is not coping, is an unproductive one.

Communicate

Keeping abreast of the latest information regarding the pandemic is imperative in keeping your employees and your business safe. Knowing the latest conversations and stats around interventions like facemasks and sanitising stations, and practises that are not as useful as initially thought will equip you to create and maintain an office environment that keeps your workers and workplace safe.

Be adaptable

With the work landscape continuously shifting, having up-to-date information about the state of the pandemic is pivotal to enable you to make as informed a decision as possible when determining how to respond should a worker develop symptoms or test positive. Or if the pandemic spikes and you need to temporarily shut down office space.

Develop strategies for the worst possible scenarios so that you can ensure your business can still function, whether that means working from home or other temporary work measures.

Give your staff a refresher

Your employees have likely been out of the office for more than a year, so consider giving them a back-to-office refresher. A run-through of company operations, changes, and new safety policies in place will help your employees reintegrate into office life more smoothly as they aren’t dealing with having to recall the minutiae of office culture.

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Optimise your workspace

One of the most common safety measures to prevent the spread of Covid is physical distancing. This means identifying ways to rearrange the office space to allow for everyone to be safely distanced should be a priority.

For communal areas like the kitchen and boardroom, set capacity limits to restrict the number of people in that space at any given time. If possible, consider employing a rotating schedule to limit the number of people in the office, day-to-day. Even the flow of foot traffic can be coordinated to further ensure workers’ safety.

Get in touch with Giant Leap for inspiration for unique, functional, workspaces that will support your staff’s safe return back to the office.

Why choose Giant Leap?

The ethos of our company is that if you treat people well, you bring out the very best in them. This means that every member of our team focuses sharply on creating work interiors that inspire and uplift to enable staff to be and do their best.

We share a passion for excellence in design, delivery, and finish, always using the finest materials, technology, logistics, and people. We create better places to work, rest and play in, allowing people an environment to focus all their attention on being original, comfortable, innovative, and inspired.

People are at the heart of everything we do; everything we design.

Giant Leap, welcome to a better place.