The world stops. The world starts up again. What’s the impact when your employees begin their return to your office?
Here are some tips from an IT perspective:
SURVEY your group: You and your team were likely surprised by how WELL some things worked when everyone was working remotely. Capture what worked well by surveying your team. Get a quick Google Form sent out so you can find the good and the bad from the work-from-home experiment.
REFRESH your passwords. If you’re not using a password manager, now is a critical time to start. With more people working remotely, you have less control over the security of your employees’ networks. A password manager will reduce the exposure if one of your passwords gets compromised, because every single web site will be able to have a unique password. The only way to manage this is using a tool like 1Password or LastPass (there are others on the market, those two are good for team use) - for more info check this out.
STANDS for your employee work-from-home laptops will help increase their professionalism during Zoom and other video conferences. Here’s a popular one from Amazon.
THROW out one thing you found you didn’t need the entire time you were out of the office. Clutter adds to stress in the workplace.
SPACE out your desks to provide more distance at work. Read about hoteling - it may be a good alternative to one-desk-per-person.
CALM - Consider reimbursing your team for an app that will improve their wellness, especially if they are resuming any sort of commute. Commute post-pandemic is even more stressful, you can get ahead of this with a very small monthly reimbursement. The Calm App has gotten great reviews.
SPEND: Some businesses didn’t survive the shutdown. You’ll see many companies selling furniture, computers, and subleasing office space. Now is a good time to consider barter, Craigslist sales, or buying inexpensive equipment to help conserve your dollars.
TOSS that yogurt in the back of the office fridge.