Getting Back to Work!

The world is getting back to work. Covid19 is not gone but life cannot be sustained without productive societies. So how we return to work is critical. If we make mistakes, the virus will win. And a Covid19 victory is not just about the illness! It is also about our economic, social, emotional, and psychological wellbeing. How are businesses supposed to consider all of that?

The biggest mistake that many leaders will make is creating a one size fits all approach to restarting business. Doing so assumes that everyone has experienced this pandemic the same way and that everyone is coming out of this with the same needs, wants, hopes, and fears. Our years of work, at Culture By Choice, has taught us that looking at our people as a monolithic aggregate of workers is a catastrophe in the making. The diversity of behavioral styles and motivational preferences that exist in every workplace requires us to have a multifaceted approach to getting back to work. Any approach that does not recognize the various points of view and worker preferences can result in so much uneasiness in the workplace that getting back to work can be stifled at best and nearly impossible at its worst. So, what’s a leader to do? Here’s what we recommend.

To begin with, make sure you really know your people. Make sure you know what their most predominant behavior styles are. What their motivational preferences are. What their core values are principles are. Designing a new workplace without this information will be based on assumptions about people that are often too narrow and quite often just wrong. Our 10 years of action research has taught us that when workers feel too uncomfortable and unconnected to their workplace, they are far less productive and often leave. Creating the best culture for your business is not just a good idea, it’s the best idea. Now is the perfect time to do that.

How do you create your best culture? That’s the most important question to answer before you restart your economic engine. In brief, I can tell you that it understands that people are at the core of that culture. So, the culture must be designed around your people. In addition, your values and principles must be reflected by that culture. To get started, talk to your people. Find out what they need, expect, hope for, and what fears they will bring back to work with them. Before Covid19, we were doing this with our clients. Now we see this as more important than ever. If you want to know more about what the best questions to ask are or other ways to get critical information on your people, send me a message and we can explore the possibilities.