Professionals dealing with facility management, employee experience, and human resources are faced with numerous questions and few answers when creating their plans to meet the needs of the new workplace under the current pandemic. We must first recognize the decisions that need to be taken are far from trivial. Governments provide basic guidelines on whether to lockdown or open up the economy, keeping physical distance, and recommendations on hygiene. However, companies are in charge and responsible for the implementation of the actual details and specific policies to make a return to the office safe while staying productive over a yet undetermined period of time that could be 18 months or more. Never have the stakes been higher. Naturally, these policies cannot be created based on generic recommendations or anecdotal accounts. They should be founded on data, facts, and analysis.

Since we are experiencing an unprecedented situation, there is no track record or previous experience to draw from. Hence, we must collect relevant data to inform our most pressing decisions. Moreover, each organization has its own preconditions, emerging needs, and challenges. You cannot simply copy what worked for one company and try to replicate it elsewhere. Your company’s new emerging needs are specific and a fast moving target. What you think could be a suitable response plan for your situation today may prove obsolete tomorrow. Agility is of the essence, but it is easy to experience decision paralysis as you try to fully assess the impact of your initiatives.

Just the operational and logistical questions around managing occupancy density, space utilization, office or desk sharing, rotation schedule and control, who should be coming to the office and for what activities, etc is already overwhelming because no one knows exactly what is the safe way to do it. Also, we must talk about the other elephant in the room: The emotional impact the pandemia is having on your workforce and how prepared you are to support your employees to remain positive, connected, and productive through this ordeal. All your efforts to organize time and space factors in your office could be undermined if you cannot respond to the various emotional needs and mental health issues that are surfacing.

We are all vulnerable in various ways. Acknowledging and considering this fact is vital. Many of us have felt loneliness, anxiety, fear, and various degrees of loss and even guilt. We must provide the tools, the practices, and the spaces to deal with these emotions. As we return to our offices, the activities we valued the most before Covid, that were enabled by a shared common space, may be hard to recover due to physical distancing and other safety protocols. Learning, innovating, creating and exchanging ideas in open collaboration with others will require new strategies.

At Happiness by Design we have identified 3 key practices to consider when creating your workplace policies in the current environment:

• A data-driven approach to decision making is critical. The data should be collected in your premises to respond to your particular situation. It should be collected once to establish a baseline, and then over time as a pulse to assess the effectiveness of your decisions, policies, initiatives, and programs.
• Integrating both the operational and emotional dimensions when creating new workplace spaces and programs will increase their overall effectiveness over time.
• Establishing programs for an optimal work-from-home experience for sustained wellbeing and productivity will be critical since the new “workplace” will be redefined as a hybrid combination between your office, your home, and the digital domain.

These three key practices work when framed in the context of a corporate culture transformation process that supports these changes over time. One might say that the time required for a typical cultural transformation process is at odds with the urgent need to quickly adapt and thrive in this new reality. However, there are ways to come up with and implement fast forming cultural alliances as a proxy to promote the needed transformation drivers.

We understand that dealing with the many questions around how to operate is already daunting, let alone dealing with a full cultural transformation process. However, the said transformation is already happening reactively if you don’t do it by design. To take control of this process, you embed the tools for cultural alignment as a means for planning and implementing your policies. Hence, proactive cultural transformation to adapt and thrive through this crisis is NOT an added unnecessary task, it is a means to create and implement all your urgent operational changes.