Re-opening declared! Your staff is back. Life returns to normal, and all is right with the world.

Sure, and I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

A business and social restart happens whenever a local or regional disaster occurs. Adjusting to the change in your environment takes time, and people need to process the changes they experience. 

In the weeks after a crisis, you learn much about the psychological and emotional tolls such events take on people. It’s important to consider that in planning your full staff return to work: what it’ll look and feel like, and just as importantly, ways in which your leadership can accelerate their reorientation. 

Make no mistake, as you show your strength and confidence to others, you experience reorientation, too.

When They Walk Through the Door to Restart

Regardless of whether you: 

• operated with a reduced staff, 
• your doors were completely closed, or 
• you were an essential organization and your staff remained in play as usual, 

change started happening (again!) as soon as the outside world declared it would reopen. 

If yours was one of the lucky organizations able to keep most staff: Members will still return having been affected by everything they experienced throughout the shutdowns and lockdowns. 

If you’re now restaffing with new people: You have extra issues to work through with new unknowns in addition to managing pandemic PTSD.

All this while you have to quickly jump back into business, with new processes, revised strategies based on uncertainty, and a dramatically altered economy. 

I hope you’re of the mindset that it’s exciting to be a leader through this transition. I’m not being sarcastic here. 

You now have the unique opportunity to reinvent your organizational culture. Build the workplace culture of your dreams. Consider strategies for your restart that you may have disregarded or even scoffed at in the past. Build your awareness of what happens when new people start working together for the first time, even if you’re dealing with returning staff. 

And let your staff help figure this out! When you involve the people who will be directly affected by new policies in deciding what those policies will be, you can speed up their acceptance and support of such change, and even motivate them to lead those changes themselves.  

You may think the priority is to jump right into business productivity. But consider that there will be limited productivity without connections, collaboration on new ideas, and acknowledgement of your staff’s mindset when they walk back in through the door for the first time.

This is the first day of the rest of your organization’s life. Your leadership will determine whether your (mostly) new culture is positive or negative.

A Novel Idea for a Novel Situation

Want to learn how exactly to put this thinking into practice? download our Return to Work Guidebook, available free to business leaders today. Filled with planning worksheets, actionable items, and even a comprehensive post COVID-19 workplace checklist, this guidebook provides you with all the tools and more you need for planning your business’ and staff’s return to work.

Return to Work Series #2: How People Come Together, or The Dynamics of Group Formation >