Lifting the Voice of Your Employees

Returning to the office is increasingly becoming more top of mind. Here, we discuss how to navigate these turbulent waters in a way that builds positive relationships with your employees: focusing on transparency, addressing specific concerns, and trusting your leaders.

Thanks to platforms like Glassdoor, transparency is increasingly becoming a demand amongst employees in the workplace. Based on a recent report from Deloitte, several companies are emphasizing transparency, simplicity and continuity in their performance evaluation frameworks. Additionally, other reports found that corporate transparency positively impacts long-term employee retention.

How to Incorporate This Into Your Return-To-Office Plan?

Step 1: Listen First. Plan Second.

While it may be easier to begin implementing policies and procedures to increase workplace visibility, doing so may result in overlooking major issues and hesitations. Instead, survey your employees to pinpoint their primary concern(s). After the survey is completed, we recommend sharing an anonymized, aggregated report of their feedback in a company-wide presentation, document or email.

Why Is This Important?

Reciting is an essential component of active listening. Tell your employees the specific conclusions drawn from the employee survey – and why. This assures your employees that the plan created on returning to the office has taken their needs into account – that they have a voice at the table.

Step 2: Address the Specifics

If your employees’ feedback brings forth concerns about childcare, make it evidently clear – preferably with a written policy – that their children’s wellbeing is paramount. For an even more active approach, some companies opt to expand childcare benefits. If employees’ main concerns are the rise in commuting costs, consider providing incentives for employees who elect to take public transportation. Or, offer flexible arrival times to help employees avoid peak traffic hours.

If health and safety concerns are most evident, share your detailed plan on office safety and sanitary guidelines. The CDC’s guidelines may be helpful.

Step 3: Trust Your Leaders

A report from Microsoft calls hybrid work ‘inevitable,’ but experts at McKinsey have found that many employees and employers are unsure of what this will look like. Accordingly, McKinsey recommends that employers be “sincere about experimenting and learning from the outcomes of your experiments.” One way to implement this practice is by giving managers and teams the autonomy to try different arrangements. It is important to trust the leaders you have put in place to set the right policies for their reports.

Bottom Line:

Returning to the office offers a lot of wins, but a lot of risks as well. You can mitigate those risks by following the three steps provided: Listen First. Plan Second., Addressing the Specifics, and Trusting your Leaders.

IMA will continue to monitor regulator guidance and offer meaningful, practical, timely information. This material should not be considered as a substitute for legal, tax and/or actuarial advice. Contact the appropriate professional counsel for such matters. These materials are not exhaustive and are subject to possible changes in applicable laws, rules, and regulations and their interpretations.