Industry Research: New Normal

As lock­down is eas­ing across the world and many com­pa­nies are think­ing about return­ing to work from home/​fur­lough, HR are now at the fore­front of get­ting every­one ready for the new normal. 

What themes can we see from the way orga­ni­za­tions answered?

1. Health and Safe­ty has been han­dled well by most organizations
We can see from the results below that 86.7% of orga­ni­za­tions have com­plet­ed or are in progress of com­plet­ing a com­pre­hen­sive risk assess­ment of their premises.

A fur­ther 75%, who share their premis­es with oth­ers, are aware or find­ing out about the plans from the build­ing man­agers about stay­ing safe. Final­ly, 81% already have in place or are putting into place a way of noti­fy­ing staff of new Covid-19 cas­es in their orga­ni­za­tion or the build­ing they occupy. 

Over­all these sta­tis­tics are real­ly pos­i­tive and it’s great to see that most orga­ni­za­tions are pri­ori­tis­ing the health and safe­ty of their peo­ple before they return to work.

2. Orga­ni­za­tions that com­mu­ni­cate bet­ter are fur­ther along in their recov­ery plans

There were sev­er­al ques­tions regard­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion and clar­i­ty with staff. The answers show a mixed response from the orga­ni­za­tions which took the quiz.

Orga­ni­za­tions should be pri­ori­tis­ing con­ver­sa­tions with their peo­ple on their views on com­ing back to work and their indi­vid­ual cir­cum­stances. We know that many peo­ple who are vul­ner­a­ble or have depen­dents and may not be able to return to work until the risks of infec­tion are lower.

More than a quar­ter of the answers to ​‘Have you asked your peo­ple about their views..’ came back with ​‘No’. Although the major­i­ty are doing well, it is still con­cern­ing to see that when giv­en the option of ​‘In progress’ a quar­ter of peo­ple chose ​‘No’.

Prac­ti­cal Tip: Get your man­agers to have this con­ver­sa­tion with their peo­ple or send out a short sur­vey to help you under­stand your employ­ees needs better.

When asked to rate on a scale of 1 – 5 on ​‘How aligned the man­agers and senior lead­ers are on com­mu­ni­ca­tions about return­ing to the work­place,’ the aver­age is 3.3. Uncer­tain­ty is a big con­trib­u­tor to anx­i­ety so if you want to sup­port your people’s well­be­ing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing often in an aligned and clear man­ner is a must. 

Fur­ther analy­sis of the answers shows us that com­pa­nies that have ​‘reg­u­lar and sched­uled’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions are 1.7 times more like­ly to have already reviewed their busi­ness strat­e­gy and com­mu­ni­cat­ed it. They are also 2.7 times more like­ly to have ​‘reviewed and actioned’ their cur­rent poli­cies on flex­i­ble work. In prac­ti­cal terms, this means that com­pa­nies that com­mu­ni­cate bet­ter are ahead in their recov­ery plans.

3. Man­agers are being left with­out the right support

One of the most con­cern­ing trends that we can see is that man­agers are being left behind.

When we asked if man­agers have been pre­pared for the dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions around return­ing to work the major­i­ty of the respons­es (52.5%) said that ​‘guid­ance hasn’t been con­sid­ered yet’. None of us have been through an epi­dem­ic like this, so we can­not assume that any orga­ni­za­tion’s man­age­ment will know how to han­dle the sen­si­tive issues that may come up. Man­ag­er guid­ance and sup­port is needed.

Anoth­er ques­tion that indi­cat­ed the same trend was 1 – 5 rat­ing of ​‘Have you assessed what assistance/​training your man­agers need in order to sup­port your staff through the next phase of busi­ness?’ with an aver­age score of 2.6.

We asked Dean Cor­bett, Chief Peo­ple Offi­cer at Avado Learning, who work with organ­i­sa­tions to build future skills in data, dig­i­tal and mar­ket­ing, why he thinks this might be hap­pen­ing and why Ava­do is dif­fer­ent. Avado’s score was one of the high­est of all respons­es and rat­ed ​‘Ready’.

It’s often the case that man­agers and employ­ees alike are asked to deliv­er peo­ple out­comes by their HR teams out of con­text or from func­tions quite dis­con­nect­ed from the real­i­ty man­agers and employ­ees face daily.

Over the last cou­ple of years, we (HR, known at Ava­do as Peo­ple Expe­ri­ence or PX), have worked real­ly hard to co-cre­ate the expe­ri­ences our peo­ple have of work­ing here. Our organ­i­sa­tion­al val­ues, the defined expec­ta­tions of peo­ple man­agers, and the ways we will work with each oth­er, tech­nol­o­gy and process­es, and learn and devel­op going for­ward, have all been co-cre­at­ed with the end users — our peo­ple — at the heart of their design and execution.

Whilst logis­ti­cal­ly there are still out­stand­ing ques­tions about what the imme­di­ate and medi­um-term future looks like for Avado’s ways of work­ing and phys­i­cal work loca­tion, we’ve been trans­par­ent about the options and the fact that we are decid­ing on the basis of what our peo­ple believe is pos­si­ble, effec­tive and suit­able to them personally.

Where tech­nol­o­gy is con­cerned, we also saw that man­agers are half as like­ly to have reg­u­lar sched­uled check-ins with their staff if they don’t use any tech­nol­o­gy or are using what the organization’s HRIS sys­tem pro­vides as com­pared to a spe­cif­ic Per­for­mance Man­age­ment and Engage­ment software.

Prac­ti­cal Tip: Pro­vid­ing the right tech­nol­o­gy can be a real­ly great way to sup­port man­age­ment process­es in your orga­ni­za­tion with­out hav­ing to be super hands-on.

What resources have been most use­ful to these organizations?
In our fol­low-up email to the sur­vey we includ­ed free resources to help those who are not as pre­pared, get ready to sup­port their peo­ple as well as logis­tics. It was no sur­prise to see that across all groups the most pop­u­lar resource was the ​‘Con­ver­sa­tion Prompts for Return­ing to Work’.

The three dif­fer­ent lev­els pre­ferred dif­fer­ent resources with Readi­ness Action Plan being most pop­u­lar in the ​‘Not Ready’ group and Con­ver­sa­tion Prompts and Employ­ee Sur­vey Tem­plate being most pop­u­lar with the ​‘Almost ready’ and ​‘Ready’ cohorts.

How does your orga­ni­za­tion compare?
By now you must be curi­ous to know where you are on the readi­ness scale. Know­ing where you stand is going to allow you to cre­ate a plan of how to get ahead. The great news is that we have all the resources you need to achieve that

Author Bio

Ruta Sudmantaite is Marketing Director at Clear Review