Gina is the Interim General Counsel and the Director of Human Resources for the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM).
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On March 13, 2020, my employer closed our offices and asked all employees to work from their homes to help in our state's effort to control the spread of the coronavirus. "It will only be for a few weeks," we all thought. Four months later, we are still working from home, and it does not look like that can change any time soon.
Over time, we all grew comfortable with makeshift home offices and Zoom meetings and scheduling e-coffee breaks to check in on each others' well-being. We adjusted to a new normal work life that seems a little like a never-ending episode of The Jetsons.
And isn't that all kind of cool?
So maybe we can stop wringing our hands and pining for what used to be. Let's reframe this pandemic-driven remote-work situation as an opportunity to shape the future and remake the world of work. Move over, Industrial Revolution and Digital Revolution — the Post-Pandemic Revolution has arrived.
Here are some ideas that have emerged during lockdown that should be adopted and adapted for a post-pandemic work life:
Job Pool Sharing
At an SHRM talent acquisition event, the head of HR for a grocery chain talked about striking a deal with a hotel chain at the start of the pandemic. The hotel chain's business had been brutalized by the pandemic and was in the midst of deep and painful staff cuts. The grocery chain was having the opposite problem. As one of the only essential employers required to remain open, it couldn't hire quickly enough. The two employers entered into an arrangement whereby the hotel chain would refer to the grocery chain the individuals it had to lay off.
Often, economic cycles reflect similar patterns of some industries rising while others struggle. Why aren't states and economic centers creating shared job pools and including their use as a condition of layoffs? Such a process could be regulated as part of the unemployment process.
The Full-Time Employee Engagement Officer
On the first day we all worked from home, I set to work, full of dread and doom. The situation was unbearably nerve-wracking — because, to state the obvious, there was so very much to worry about. Would one of my co-workers become ill? What if they died? How would the staff cope? What if the laptops our employees were using failed? What if employees couldn't figure out how to access our systems remotely? What if the VPN broke down, and we had a cybersecurity breach?
It wasn't just me worrying like this; I was pretty certain everyone on our staff was worrying, too. I needed to find a way to reassure employees, to make them feel connected to each other through this shared experience.
Those first-morning anxieties were the genesis of a morning email sent to staff. I reached out with information about how best to work from home. I provided tools and links to articles. And on that first morning, I ended the email on a reassuring tone, sharing a link to a video tweeted by Chicago's Shedd Aquarium showing its penguins experiencing the aquarium for the first time ever as visitors normally do.
Almost 100 morning emails later, I still receive messages from staff telling me the emails make them feel connected to something bigger than what their cat is up to in the corner of their home office that day. During this time, my team and I have also pulled together employee trivia games. We've done random check-in calls. We've arranged happy hours and activities. In other words, we've shown employees we care about their well-being. But why did it take a pandemic for us to start showing our employees this kind of extra attention?
Unfortunately, engaging more than 100 employees is a lot of work — it's literally a full-time job. Shouldn't our org charts be reflecting this? Wouldn't that be an effective talent recruitment tool? Maybe it's time to create full-time engagement officer roles in our organizations, and maybe they should be embedded in the business units.
The Workplace Temperature Check
While we face this pandemic, employers can take employee temperatures and do health assessments to ensure that infected employees are not inadvertently exposing the workplace to Covid-19.
Every winter, I am plagued by a string of employees who parade through my office, complaining about co-workers who come to work when they are sick. Grade schools created a terrible habit when they started awarding perfect attendance, and no amount of emailing or sick time updates or on-site flu shots can undo that damage. Some people just can't stop themselves from coming to work when they're sick.
How many problems would it solve if we just submitted all employees to a no-touch temperature check every day? The intrusion is small, and the existence of a temperature is not a red flag for the existence of a disability — it only reveals the existence of an infection. As more jurisdictions move to create paid sick leave requirements, "temp check leave" could be baked into ordinances and regulations to eliminate the problems that come with the too-dedicated sick employee.
Adopting any one of these policy ideas could have a profound impact on our future work lives. Remote work won't last forever. Let's act now to ensure these nontechnical solutions start getting adopted long-term.
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