How to Prepare to Get Back to Office Culture

The return to full-time employment is looming for all of us. While we may have found WFH culture off-putting at first, the new problem playing on our anxieties is the return to work… not the time off we had in the first place.

That’s right: the world is trying its best to open back up again. But, as it does so, the shackles of working from home are cast aside, and employers everywhere are panicking. We’ll discuss why the need for anxiety in a moment, right after we give you the lowdown. 

Why are we so Scared to Return to the Office?

It’s not just employees that are scared to return to work. Anxiety surrounding using transport we were told unsafe, sitting in buildings with other households, and even passing someone in public who sneezes – it all adds up.

For employers, though, things are even trickier.  When you are an employer, you must organize an entire office of people who need to return to work. In addition, you must incorporate the new covid-19 restrictions within the workplace, and you must open a building that has potentially lain empty for anything up to 15 months.

Other things your employer must do to ready the workplace for the employees return include:

• Ensuring hand sanitizing stations are in place
• Marking 2 m distance instructions on the floor and setting up a one-way system
• Buying new office furniture to replace those which employees took home
• Updating all the software on-site
• Finding new staff 
• Updating guidance on handling contamination
• Ensuring they’re listed in any trace systems, the government has a place for consumers

Above all else, however, your employer needs to make sure that the building is fit for its purpose… That’s if they still have a structure. Unfortunately, many employers decided to ditch bricks and mortar for good after the onset of coronavirus. This potentially explains why so many people still work from home, even as vaccines are being rolled out.

3 Things You Can Do to Prepare to Get Back to The Office

 Here are a few tips and tricks on how you can be prepared for a return to office culture.

 1 – Find a new office space

Finding an office for rent isn’t as hard as you might think. There are plenty of buildings which were left untended due to covid-19. Some of these businesses are no longer operational. You should be able to find better office space when you previously thought possible because of this.

2 – Follow all government guidelines

If you live in the west, you will likely find that your local government has instructions on how you can keep employees and customers safe. However, cross-contamination will be a genuine problem in the coming months, so we must follow all advice to minimize the spread of the virus.

3 – Focus on culture

The sooner we can get back to the routine we had before, the better.  The key to successfully re-establishing successful office life lies in how quickly we can build a new office culture.

The days of meeting for a chat around the water fountain might be over, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find new ways to encourage team building on a day-to-day basis. So keep up those weekly meetings you were operating through zoom, bringing those doughnuts for the break room, just because.

Getting back to normal is the key to getting through all of this. So focus on creating that normal, and we should keep both clients and staff happy from now on.