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Tag: new normal

  • How To Invite Your Employees Back To The Office

    How To Invite Your Employees Back To The Office

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    It was easy to go home because we had to. Now, how do we get people to want to come back?

    In 2019, less than 6% of American workers worked primarily from home. Then COVID hit, and by May 2020, 35% of workers worked completely remotely, as high as 57% among professional and management occupations.

    Now, business leaders want people back in the office. Without in-person workplace interactions, leaders see workers missing out on building vital connections that facilitate collaboration and innovation and the soft skills gained by interacting with people at various levels within the company.

    But according to Pew research, 61% of remote workers say they work from home because they prefer to. Among knowledge workers unsatisfied with their current workplace flexibility, 71% said they were open to finding another job in the oncoming year. Demanding workers come back will drive quit rates and turn off new talent.

    The best way to bring workers back to the office is by inviting them and making it an inviting place where people want and need to be.

    Related: Should You Bring Employees Back to the Office?

    Social engagement is a good start.

    A 2022 workplace trends survey found that 77% of responding organizations had adopted a hybrid model and most employed an “at-will” policy of office attendance. To encourage people to return, 88 % use incentives to draw people to the office, including exaggerated efforts, like Microsoft’s beer and wine tastings, Qualcomm’s group fitness classes and Google’s private concert featuring Lizzo.

    Many companies have made similar, less extravagant, efforts to lure people back with promises of food and social activities, which is a great place to start. According to the 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index, 85% of employees said rebuilding team bonds would motivate them to return to the office. Other 2022 surveys also found face-to-face collaboration and socialization as the top draws of office time.

    As we come back from nearly two years of working outside of the office, a focus on building social capital is important, but the office can’t be all about parties. The benefits of improved collaboration and innovation come from a healthy culture where people are free to bring themselves to work. Socialization can get that ball rolling and be a significant draw to get people back to the office, but more efforts are needed to make it a necessary place to work.

    Related: The Case For Going Back To The Office

    Build an inviting space

    Invest in creating a physical environment conducive to a hybrid world where people need and want to be to get their best work done. Renovate office spaces to fit evolving intentions. In an Envoy workplace survey of 800 workers, 61% said their companies had changed their physical workplace to accommodate a hybrid model. Leaders at Marriot, Capital One and Spotify are prioritizing comfortability, communal spaces and more conference rooms for collaboration and dialogue.

    People don’t come back to the office to work in a cube. They come back to sit together and work with others in ways that Zoom is less effective. At Clearfield, we are creating the image of what we want our home base mothership (and we do call it the “mothership”) office to become in this hybrid world, starting with significant renovations. We kept the bright, open, well-lit space, and we did away with most of the aisles of cube farms. We built conference rooms and a lot of training spaces.

    Related: It Might be a Company-Ending Mistake to Go Back to the Office

    Invite them to learn more and grow

    In our shift to hybrid, one of our strongest considerations is a focus on training. By building dedicated training rooms, we support internal growth opportunities, incentivizing people to be at the office to gain more knowledge and grow. It also introduces social opportunities to hold recognition ceremonies at the office as people are promoted.

    Interaction among our sales organization had typically been with customers, not one another, so when we got sent home, they felt the benefits of working remotely full-time. But as we grew larger and started to train and promote people from within, the salespeople who became leads and supervisors suddenly realized the need to bring in their teams and train. From the leadership position of a growing company, it becomes easier to see what makes coming together to learn and advance so critical.

    Attract people to the office with training and opportunities to do their jobs better, and let them see room for growth within the company. I believe people want to do their jobs well and want access to information that could help them do that. Our new office training rooms give employees access to resources to improve their hard and soft skills. We’re also investing in a learning management system to help track all of our training opportunities and to get them out to more of our employees.

    Invite with expectations

    Invite people back, but with expectations. Some leaders enter into a hybrid or work-from-home model and remain unclear in their expectations. They want people in the office but let team members’ level of “hybrid” be user-led. The trend of companies allowing unlimited PTO, for example, will enable people to define the total time they take off individually. Still, unless everyone really believes they can and should be allowed to take six or seven weeks of vacation, they would probably never attempt to test those boundaries. Without expectations, so much autonomy exists in a cloud of uncertainty.

    Leaders should also set expectations around meetings and schedule them with intention. Our design engineers lead our product innovation programs and typically host weekly product reviews, but after COVID, we had to start doing them over Zoom. Once we could, these meetings were the first thing we brought back. Lead engineers needed their peers to touch the prototypes and experience them first-hand with a full range of senses, including the sixth sense — intuition — that got lost over a Zoom call.

    Inviting people back to the office is much more powerful than demanding that they come back, but that invitation needs to come with more than free food and parties — it should come with planning and clear expectations. Turn the office into a place where people want and need to go and draw them there in ways that encourage them to be more productive.

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    Cheri Beranek

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  • Hundreds of Americans Will Die From COVID Today

    Hundreds of Americans Will Die From COVID Today

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    Over the past week, an average of 491 Americans have died of COVID each day, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The week before, the number was 382. The week before that, 494. And so on.

    For the past five months or so, the United States has trod along something of a COVID-death plateau. This is good in the sense that after two years of breakneck spikes and plummets, the past five months are the longest we’ve gone without a major surge in deaths since the pandemic’s beginning, and the current numbers are far below last winter’s Omicron highs. (Case counts and hospital admissions have continued to fluctuate but, thanks in large part to the protection against severe disease conferred by vaccines and antivirals, they have mostly decoupled from ICU admissions and deaths; the curve, at long last, is flat.) But though daily mortality numbers have stopped rising, they’ve also stopped falling. Nearly 3,000 people are still dying every week.

    We could remain on this plateau for some time yet. Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, told me that as long as a dangerous new variant doesn’t emerge (in which case these projections would go out the window), we could see only a slight bump in deaths this fall and winter, when cases are likely to surge, but probably—or at least hopefully—nothing too drastic. In all likelihood, though, deaths won’t dip much below their present levels until early 2023, with the remission of a winter surge and the additional immunity that surge should confer. In the most optimistic scenarios that Meyers has modeled, deaths could at that point get as low as half their current level. Perhaps a tad lower.

    Read: How did this many deaths become normal?

    By any measure, that is still a lot of people dying every day. No one can say with any certainty what 2023 might have in store, but as a reference point, 200 deaths daily would translate to 73,000 deaths over the year. COVID would remain a top-10 leading cause of death in America in this scenario, roughly twice as deadly as either the average flu season or a year’s worth of motor-vehicle crashes.

    COVID deaths persist in part because we let them. America has largely decided to be done with the pandemic, even though the pandemic stubbornly refuses to be done with America. The country has lifted nearly all of its pandemic restrictions, and emergency pandemic funding has been drying up. For the most part, people have settled into whatever level of caution or disregard suits them. A Pew Research survey from May found that COVID did not even crack Americans’ list of the top 10 issues facing the country. Only 19 percent said that they consider it a big problem, and it’s hard to imagine that number has gone anywhere but down in the months since. COVID deaths have shifted from an emergency to the accepted collateral damage of the American way of life. Background noise.

    On one level, this is appalling. To simply proclaim the pandemic over is to abandon the vulnerable communities and older people who, now more than ever, bear the brunt of its burden. Yet on an individual level, it’s hard to blame anyone for looking away, especially when, for most Americans, the risk of serious illness is lower now than it has been since early 2020. It’s hard not to look away when each day’s numbers are identically grim, when the devastation becomes metronomic. It’s hard to look each day at a number—491, 382, 494—and experience that number for what it is: the premature ending of so many individual human lives.

    People grow accustomed to these daily tragedies because to not would be too painful. “We are, in a way, victims of our own success,” Steven Taylor, a psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia who has written one book on the psychology of pandemics and is at work on another, told me. Our adaptability is what allowed us to weather the worst of the pandemic, and it is also what’s preventing us from fully escaping the pandemic. We can normalize anything, for better or for worse. “We’re so resilient at adapting to threats,” Taylor said, that we’ve “even habituated to this.”

    Read: America was in an early-death crisis long before COVID

    Where does that leave us? As the nation claws its way out of the pandemic—and reckons with all of its lasting damage—what do we do with the psychic burden of a death toll that might not decline substantially for a long time? Total inurement is not an option. Neither is maximal empathy, the feeling of each death reverberating through you at an emotional level. The challenge, it seems, is to carve out some sort of middle path. To care enough to motivate ourselves to make things better without caring so much that we end up paralyzed.

    Perhaps we will find this path. More likely, we will not. In earlier stages of the pandemic, Americans talked at length about a mythic “new normal.” We were eager to imagine how life might be different—better, even—after a tragedy that focused the world’s attention on disease prevention. Now we’re staring down what that new normal might actually look like. The new normal is accepting 400 COVID deaths a day as The Way Things Are. It’s resigning ourselves so completely to the burden that we forget that it’s a burden at all.

    In the time since you started reading this story, someone in the United States has died of COVID. I could tell you a story about this person. I could tell you that he was a retired elementary-school teacher. That he was planning a trip with his wife to San Diego, because he’d never seen the Pacific Ocean. That he was a long-suffering Knicks fan and baked a hell of a peach cobbler, and when his grandchildren visited, he’d get down on his arthritic knees, and they’d play Connect Four, and he’d always let them win. These details, though hypothetical, might sadden you—or sadden you more, at least, than when I told you simply that since you started this story, one person had died of COVID. But I can’t tell you that story 491 times in one day. And even if I could, could you bear to listen?

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    Jacob Stern

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