The Coronavirus pandemic has changed the world, and all of us will have to accept that things in the future are going to be different. As a business, it is important to start planning for these changes now, and start implementing answers to them as soon as possible. Read on for five of the trends that will most effect how your workers are able to work together in the time of Covid-19.
The move away from landline phone services
While web-based phone services have had a small advantage over more traditional landline services for a while now, the uncertainty of our current situation means that it is vital that workers who can work remotely have the tools to. Being able to use a single unified phone service that can enable business calls from anywhere and avoid causing your employees confusion or anxiety about separating business calls while they are at home can hugely improve morale. Investing now to have voice, data and mobile services by Gamma set up to your company’s unique specifications can pay huge dividends in the future.
The embedding of social distancing in work culture
Since social distancing will be a requirement for the near future at least, companies have been preparing and finding ways to have people safely in the workplace at responsible distances. Assuming that this trend will continue it is important that you try to offset the ways this can be intimidating and upsetting. While people may want to spend less time in the office, pubs and restaurants reopening provides a potential alternative for boosting collaboration.
The moving of a lot of “work” socialising outside the office
Once you have made the office a safe and effective place to work and have worked on issues of ventilation and entering and exiting, consider ways to get the team engaged with each other without the help of physical closeness. Booking more optional trips out so that colleagues have the option of spending time together outside the workplace can be good for this, especially if the company does the work of organising the booking, as people can feel more able to socialise away from the workplace now.
Adapting to the need for things to be cleaned and sterilised far more than before
If you want your teams to be able to work together easily, it will be necessary to optimise the workspace for being easy to clean. Choosing furniture that can be more easily cleaned down can save a lot of time in this respect. Planning for things such as swinging doors that do not need to be opened by hand from either side can help reduce the risk of transmission from door handles.
Good internet and home working plans are essential
Making sure that your employees are able to work from home, and that you can support them in this, is now more important than ever. Many networks worldwide have felt the strain during lockdown. It may well be worth offering incentives on a case by case basis, when hiring, that you can offer a home internet upgrade, so they are ready to do their best work if there is another lockdown.
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