Recently, Alchemer hosted a webinar with HR.com to talk about the challenges of returning to the workplace after 14 to 18 months away. The panelists – Vanessa Bagnato, Director of Enterprise Solutions, and Sue Bonsor, Director of Customer Support at Alchemer – talked about the different workplace models and considerations for developing a return-to-work plan, and involving employees in the decision during the webinar.  

Different Work Models 

Returning to the Way it Was. Even though we now must create more hygienic work environments with less communal food, this model tries to recreate the way the organization worked before the pandemic.  

Clubhouse Model. This hybrid model encourages employees to come to the office when they need to collaborate, and work from home when they need to work without interruptions. In this case the office serves more as a hub. 

Activity-based Working. In this model, employees work from the office, but no longer have assigned desks. Instead, they spend their day working where it makes the most sense – in a team huddle, with one other person, or alone. Some companies use a reservation process to ensure each employee has a desk. This allows organizations to operate in smaller spaces with fewer desks than employees. 

Hub-and-Spoke Model. This approach creates smaller satellite offices closer to where employees live, cutting commute times while giving employees the benefits of face-to-face interactions. 

Fully Virtual. This model is how most companies worked during the pandemic, where employees work from any location, such as home or anywhere they like.  

How Others Are Doing It 

A Gartner study showed that 82 percent of companies intend to permit some remote working as people return to the office. However, 30 percent of corporate leaders worry about maintaining their corporate culture without people in the office.  

Google has announced plans to reopen offices with some locations returning to work before September first. However, offices will operate at limited capacity, taking regional health guidelines into consideration. Google also announced that they expect employees to live within commuting distance of an office – in effect, choosing a hybrid model over the fully remote model that some other tech companies, such as Twitter have chosen. 

Allstate Insurance surveyed employees and found that many employees did not want to return to the office full-time. After analysis, Allstate realized that most functions don’t require an office setting. They announced that 75 percent of the roles can be performed remotely, while 24 percent can be done on a hybrid basis. The remaining 1 percent will return to a pre-COVID style of office setting. This includes some top executives and certain customer-facing roles. 

Apple employees did not feel heard and are pushing back against a new policy that required them to return to work three days a week. Employees wanted a more flexible approach to work remotely with over 80 employees writing a letter to leadership expressing their thoughts and desire to be asked. Many employees have chosen to leave, especially in light of both Facebook and Twitter telling employees they can work from home forever. 

Atlassian revealed a new Team Anywhere policy, the company requires staff to travel to their nearest office four times a year. Based on employee surveys, the company expects to have about 50-percent office attendance. 

Considerations 

When you develop or finalize your Return to the Workplace plan, there are several considerations to take into account.  

1. Establish what your employees want and what your company needs to maintain your corporate culture, then determine the return-to-work approach that is best for your organization. 
2. Map out a timeline to set expectations for employees. Employees need to plan for childcare, family care, commuting, pet care, and other situations that might have changed over the past 16 months or so. Even if the timeline changes, employees will be more understanding if there is transparency about expectations. A McKinsey study found that employees want more certainty about post-pandemic working arrangement, even if businesses don’t yet know what to say. According to the McKinsey study, organizations that have already articulated more specific policies about the workplace have seen employee well-being and productivity rise. 
3. Get feedback from employees on the plan.  
4. Evaluate the physical workspace and ensure that it is safe for your employees.  
5. Consult with local government guidelines, which can vary by city, county, state, province, and country.  
6. Determine policies surrounding employee screenings and protocols. 
7. If you require daily health assessments or other check-ins, Alchemer found that posting a QR code at every door really simplified compliance. 
8. Determine how you will deal with vaccinated versus non-vaccinated employees. This is a very sensitive topic that could become an inclusivity issue. 
9. Decide what, if any, protective gear or cleaning supplies you need. 
10. Determine your corporate travel policy both domestically and internationally. 
11. Do not expect your plans to be static. You will need to monitor employee satisfaction (pulse surveys really help here) and be flexible with iterations due to employee feedback or changes to government guidelines or other factors. 

With the dangerous Delta variant cropping up, we all should plan to have our plans change. Remember to continue to communicate with employees and government health officials to protect your people. 

To learn about Alchemer’s Return-to-Work solution, click here. 

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By the Alchemer HR Team 

As Colorado and the Greater Denver area relax Covid restrictions, we have begun welcoming our employees back to our main office. Here are some of the lessons we learned as we reopened.  

Understand Your Employees: Return to Work

When we decided to reopen, we wanted to understand people’s concerns and challenges with coming back to work. We ran the Alchemer Return to Work survey, and we were somewhat surprised by the results. It turned out not everyone shared the executive team’s excitement about returning to the office.  Many were hesitant, and for a variety of reasons.   

Several employees had adopted pets (a common trend, with shelters everywhere emptying for the first time), some had new children, others had changes to their child-care situations, several had moved further from the office, and some had started working at Alchemer during the pandemic and didn’t know what “working in the office” looked like. A few were simply unsure of the safety of working in a group environment again.

A lot had changed in people’s lives, and they had adapted to a work-from-home lifestyle.  Going back to work in an office was a disruption to the new normal. By understanding our employees’ challenges and concerns, we were able to create a timeline for returning to the office that allowed people to arrange for child and pet care, to emotionally prepare for the change, and for the company to address health concerns related to working in an office. Together we figured out the best timing

Keep Everyone Healthy: Daily Health Assessments 

To keep our employees healthy, and to comply with government regulations, employees must now complete a health assessment every day before they come to work. The health assessments also provide a record of everybody who has come into the office in case there is an outbreak, and we need to manage contact-tracing protocols.

Most people have the assessment on their phones so they can complete it easily. However, we did discover that it is easy to forget to complete the assessment before arriving at the office, so we added a QR code with it on all the doors.  In addition to the health assessment, we also communicate and enforce state guidelines for mask-wearing.

Stay Connected: New Conversations 

The pandemic has changed the way we do and think about many different things. We’re also having conversations on topics we never thought we’d be having at work.

Vaccinations have always been a personal matter. Now that subject is front and center in the workplace.

Can you work in the office if you’re not vaccinated? Do you have to prove that you are vaccinated? What if you can’t be vaccinated for health, religious, or other personal reasons? Does the company have a right to this information? This is new territory for businesses, and talking about it is the best way for teams to work through these questions.  

Equally, people almost never discussed concerns about being in a building with other people prior to the pandemic. A conversation about a safe work environment used to focus mainly on other peoples’ behavior – now it must include more traditional health concerns as well. Open dialogue about office cleanliness and how suppliers and other visitors must demonstrate health compliance is very important to helping people feel comfortable about returning to the office.

Be Aware: New Habits and Old Habits 

One of the biggest challenges every company will face is that everyone has developed new work habits over the last 14 months. We’ve become accustomed to our new normal, which has blended home life with work life.  

Working from home has meant no commute and not having to put on shoes. It also meant being immediately present for young children, pets, and elderly parents.  Going back to work requires dusting off old habits – lining up care for those who need it or getting up early enough to make the train or drive the commute. Something as basic as thinking about lunch once again requires planning ahead versus simply opening the refrigerator.

Identifying and restoring old habits will take some thought and time, as overcoming inertia and embracing change are rarely easy. Talk about the changes people need to make in order to return to the office. Remind each other that we all did it before.

Brush Up: Social Skills 

Working from home has made it easy to disconnect from people because they aren’t sharing the same physical space with you. But in-person conversations do not come with a mute button, and it’s much harder to get away with multi-tasking in person. As we’ve started coming back together, we’ve noticed we’re all a bit rusty at being around people.

On one hand, we know more about each other personally because our homes were often our Zoom backgrounds, and pets and children often joined our calls. But we need to brush up again on what it means to be in conference rooms together, to work in cubes, and to respect each other’s physical space. We don’t need our computers to communicate anymore – we can look each other in the eyes and connect three-dimensionally. Let’s remember how to do that.

Be Patient

Being more patient is probably one of the skills we will all need to embrace. Getting back to normal will take time as people emerge from their home offices and figure out how to operate in a post-pandemic world. This is true not only for employees, but for vendors and suppliers as well. 

Especially office supply companies, many of whom made significant changes to their staffing to weather the downturn in business created by everyone working from home. We have a supplier who previously handled just the greater Denver area, but is now responsible for the whole state. As more businesses come back to work, we hope they can return to the old coverage model, but for now, our supplier can’t be as responsive as they were before the pandemic, and we need to be more patient as a result. 

Recognize This is New For Everyone 

There hasn’t been a similar pandemic for more than 100 years, so there is no playbook for how we all come back together. Some will eagerly embrace a return to the office, while others will be hesitant.

And some things that were common before will likely change or disappear altogether. For now, we at Alchemer have stopped donut and bagel days just because we’re not sure if it’s safe or proper. Will they come back? We’ll have to see. When we see each other for the first time, how do we greet each other? Hug? Shake hands? Fist bump? Wave? We need to work that out, too.

At Alchemer, we believe it’s important that we come out of our home offices, basements, and attics and figure out how to return to working together safely. We believe we serve our customers better when we can brainstorm and whiteboard and solve problems in the same room. For various reasons, not everyone can or will return to the office, but we know we’re a better company when most of us are together. Our aim is to come back together thoughtfully, deliberately, and with consideration for all that has changed.

The post Lessons We’ve Learned While Returning to Work appeared first on Alchemer.

1. Be honest. None of us have lived through this before, so it’s new for everybody. Let your employees know that you’re figuring this out as you go, just like everybody else. Nobody has tested best practices yet.  

2. Automate. Use the Alchemer Return-to-Work Solution to automate and simplify the process. The solution includes daily Return-to-Work assessments, temperature recording, daily and cumulative reports, desk reservations, and visitor and contractor requests. Learn more here. 

3. Mobilize. Make sure employees and visitors can complete your daily health assessment on a mobile device. This will allow them to complete it in the parking lot or even at the door.    

4. Simplify. Create a QR code that takes employees to the daily health assessment. Print out the QR code and put it at every entrance. This allows people who forget to do the health assessment at home to quickly complete it at the office. When we did this at Alchemer, our compliance went from 60-70% to well over 90%.  

5. Plan ahead. Leave lots of lead time for vendors to fulfill requests. Many of them are returning to work or staffing up and things could take longer. 

6. Be patient. People have created new habits over the past 14 months and returning to work is now a new habit people must get used to.  

Establishing rules and holding to them will help people feel more comfortable and help them develop new habits. Tracking attendance helps with contact tracing, should somebody develop symptoms.  

It’s a brave new world we’re all entering together. Take care of each other. 

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When people talk about customer centricity, do you immediately think of your employees? Most companies don’t view their employees as a critical component when it comes to gathering insight into the customer experience or even as a brand ambassador. However, employees provide valuable insights into the customer experience. And, are often overlooked in terms of gathering feedback.  

Whether you want to deliver a survey to your employees to gather important feedback on the customer experience, or a survey to gather feedback on the employee experience inside departments within your organization, we have a solution! 

When building a survey for your organization, it’s common to want the option to make the feedback completely anonymous. There are several ways that you can accomplish this anonymity. Before we proceed with the examples, let’s go into the exact information that is withheld when building an anonymous survey.  

• IP Addresses 
• Geo-Location Data 
• Email Invite Data 
• Response IDs are remitted from Email Invite Status Logs 
• Session ID 

Important considerations before you begin! 

When you enable the Anonymous Survey Setting below, this cannot be undone, even by the support team. This is important to note, especially in surveys where data is already collected.  

Click Here to Learn How to Enable Anonymous Survey Setting

Option 1: Create Tracking Links For Each Department 

Benefits:  

• Allows for segmentation of responses in Standard Reports.  

Considerations:  

• Tracking links are typically sent by a system of your choice (not by our Email Campaign System, see Option 2).  

To learn more about Tracking Links and how to set these up, head over to our documentation below. 

https://help.alchemer.com/help/tracking-links

Option 2: Create Email Campaigns For Each Department 
 
Benefits:  

• Allows for segmentation of responses of Standard Reports.         
• Reminder Emails can be scheduled. 

Considerations:  

• When delivering an anonymous survey through our email campaign feature, we don’t allow for visibility into who has taken the survey to protect the anonymity of respondents. 

Option 3: Create a question in the survey, identifying which department they are from 

Benefits:  

• Can use a single tracking link or a single email campaign, the department identification question in the survey would instead be used.  
• Segments are also available to use in Standard Reports, based on the department question within your survey.  

Considerations:  

• If you use this method, you cannot separate your email contacts into departments. Instead, this allows the respondent to identify his / her department instead. 

If you’d like to learn more about segmenting response data by department, please visit the guide below. 

https://help.alchemer.com/help/compare-data-with-segments

If you have any questions about the features mentioned in this article, please reach out to our support team. How to contact support 

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It’s been a year since we closed our office in Boulder and sent everybody home. Over the last 12 months, everything about the workplace has changed. For the first part of last year we all tried to adjust as best we could, suddenly being thrust into remote workplaces, non-stop Zoom meetings, managing our kids’ at-home learning while working, keeping our families safe, and trying to keep employees engaged while trying to stay engaged ourselves. Now we’re seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, but questions remain about what our new normal will be. 

And, while my focus is on the relationships between our team members, relationships with customers have changed as well. Every customer now looks for ways to do business both online and in-person according to their unique needs and situation. And the most progressive organizations are embracing strategies focused on customer-centricity.  

At its core, customer-centricity is: 

• An emphasis on putting the customer at the heart of every business decision 
• The empowerment of employees to adjust each customer experience  
• A cultural shift in how organizations view their customers 

However, all of this only works if you have a corresponding transformation to employee-centricity.  

What exactly is employee-centricity?   

Much like a customer-centric organization, an employee-centric organization puts people at the core of everything it does. Building an employee-centric business starts by creating a culture where innovation, creativity, and empowerment are encouraged throughout the organization, regardless of the level of the employee. In an employee-centric organization, all employees are connected to their customers and prospects, as well as to their peers and leadership. Employees in this environment are encouraged to: 

• Help customers have a great experience 
• Challenge internal processes that may be impacting productivity 
• Promote out-of-the-box solutions when situations arise 

Most of all, you need to create a culture where employees feel respected and engaged and believe they have an opportunity to grow.  

Empowered employees drive customer-centricity 

Fully empowering employees, regardless of position within the hierarchy, is fundamental to any employee-centric organization. We’ve all been the customer in a situation where something went wrong. We just want somebody who can help to hear our concerns and make it right. It just doesn’t feel very good when an unempowered employee responds by saying, “Sorry, I can’t help you.” Even if we understand, we don’t feel great about that brand experience.  

However, when we encounter an empowered employee who can respond immediately and corrects the situation, we want to tell others about that experience. We also look for ways to do more business with that organization. That scenario represents a customer-centric organization, and it all starts with a foundation of employee-centricity. 

How to design and build an employee-centric organization 

As your organization begins building its customer-centric strategy, recognize that a critical component of success will be the implementation of an employee-centric strategy. Here are some of the cultural and technical issues that will require your attention: 

• Foster employee-focused leadership – Leaders at all levels of your organization must actively listen to employees and ask important questions, rather than simply giving orders and answers. This shift will encourage employees to become more engaged and involved. 
• Build processes based on understanding employee needs and expectations – Often internal human resource processes have been in place for years but are not adjusted to interact with employees in the ways that they prefer. More honest, representative input will be received when the processes are built around the employees.  
• Encourage participation and share performance metrics – Engage employees in product roadmaps, customer interactions, content creation, and more. Sharing key metrics with the entire team and regularly letting them know how their individual role and contributions impact those metrics has a profound effect on engagement. Don’t hesitate to share times when the metrics are not where you want them and ask for input and solutions when that occurs.  
• Continuously enhance employee experiences through feedback – Companies often do an annual “climate survey” – however, what’s true in spring is often not important as the winter holidays approach. You need to capture feedback on a regular basis. Many organizations use Employee Net Promoter Score surveys to regularly do a quick check on employee engagement and experience. Building a culture where employees know they are free to provide feedback will foster employee-centricity. 

We all expect that 2021 will probably redefine the workplace and employee experience. Some of us will be back in the office while others will continue to work remotely. However, you can create more consistency in your people’s lives by putting customers at the heart of every decision you make. And that starts by building an employee-centric foundation that will make your people feel like team-mates more than co-workers.  

Working for a company that creates solutions to bring organizations closer to people, we have developed a product that helps HR people at small and mid-sized businesses become more employee-centric. It’s called The Employee Experience Solution. It offers all the assessments and surveys you need to keep a steady pulse on your people. Plus, it offers ways to make employee access to HR benefits and requests much more manageable for stretched HR teams. 

Learn more here.  

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Alchemer Support Hero, Topper Shull lives and breathes customer centricity with our customers. Listen to his insights on putting customers at the center of everything he does.

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