Businesses are having to be agile more than ever to cope with the current pandemic. We have looked at a number of situations employers are dealing with today.
Isolating employees
There are significant issues with regards to testing reported recently and the disruption that this has had on parents, carers and front line workers. The requirement for households to isolate under current government guidance can be challenging for businesses to manage. Flexibility has been and will be the key to managing this and supporting your employees as much as possible. Businesses need to be prepared that employees may need to work from home if they get a call from school or someone in their house has COVID-19 symptoms. Discuss with your employees the process that they are required to follow so that expectations can be managed.
Workforce returning to the office
A significant number of businesses have now returned to the workplace with some experiencing varied results in productivity. Some of our clients are reporting an increase in productivity where employees are bouncing ideas off one another and there is a buzz in the workplace. However, some are having a bit more of a trickier time transitioning back to the workplace, with employees reporting more distractions and not being able to concentrate on doing their work. Employers should be speaking with their employees on an individual basis to check in on how they are working and if there can be any improvements. Many businesses are opting for more of a hybrid way of working whereby there is more flexibility in how employees are working, e.g. working from home to concentrate on a piece of work and in the office for collaboration with fellow colleagues.
Employees working from home
Many businesses are continuing to work from home with early 2021 as a target to return to the workplace for some and others are not looking to return at all, adopting a remote working model. What provisions are in place to ensure that the health and wellbeing of staff are addressed? It has been nearly 6 months since the country was told to lockdown, what changes in terms or productivity and performance have you seen? Each employee is different and adapt individually to different work settings. Some employees have embraced working from home, others are missing the social interaction.
Restructures and redundancies
We are seeing a lot of businesses having to rethink their business model and whether it is sustainable. This has led to unfortunately to redundancies. Redundancies can be very emotionally draining for those who are carrying them out as well as those who are at risk or affected. It is important to keep remembering that it is the role being made redundant and not the person.
How are you managing the above? We would be interested to hearing more from you about the challenges facing your business! Here at Peach we have been supporting businesses in a number of ways to get through these challenges, whether it is being at the end of a phone to provide reassurances and robust legal advice, to providing more hands on support in consultation meetings.
