How to ‘get back’ to pre-pandemic work mode…or not

Lots of folks are wrestling with how to ‘get back’ to pre-pandemic work mode, particularly face to face work.  I’m working with several organizations on just that including one healthcare provider system and an international firm with a USA based ‘essential business’.  For them, it’s not that they haven’t run hard over the last year+; it’s that they had to do it in a more scattered and even fragmented fashion with many people on site and many not.  Hence, coming back together poses challenges both similar and different from those faced elsewhere.

Here’s some counsel about the return to face to face work likely of use in many settings:

1)    Coming back together is not like throwing a switch.  People have been and are going through a lot.  Some you know about and some you don’t.  They aren’t the same as they were (and neither are you) before the events of the past year+ so take some time to plan the reintegration of your workplace.  One organization that I’m working with has targeted September for return to mainly face to face office work and is already nearly a month into planning.

2)    Seize the opportunity.  As per my work systems model (Leading Successful Change), workplace design qualifies as one of 8 key aspects comprising the work environment and that can become one of 8 key levers of change.  Covid provides the opportunity to reconsider the design of your workplace broadly defined (i.e., including remote).  Just what kind of workplace interaction do you want?  Seize the moment to create your desired workplace of the future.

3)    Sort through the working remotely data with care.  A spate of articles have appeared concerning working remotely and what the last year means for what comes next.  Even those articles based on research rather than just anecdotes can present flawed studies or aggregate studies into misleading summaries.  For example, are remote workers more productive?  It depends.

4)    Revisit the underlying demands of the work to be done.  My article with Richard Guzzo from long ago (MIT Sloan Management Review, 1987) includes discussion and key references concerning the importance of inherent task structure.  (“Group Effectiveness: What Really Matters?”)  As Robert Keidel lays out in Game Plans, the nature of the game drives the level and nature of interaction.  Restated, necessary ‘teaming’ in track and field varies notably from teaming in synchronized swimming and both differ greatly from teaming in lacrosse.  Different games, different inherent task interdependency, and different required organizing.  Therefore, organize according to the work needing doing.

That said, stay in touch.  Let me know if I can assist you in this change, may it come soon and safely.

Keep paddling,