Questions To Be Answered Before Building "Back To Normal" Action Plan

Organizations have been working on “back to office” scenarios. We believe before going back to “normal” or what is labeled as “new normal”, there are a set of questions that need to be answered:

• What did your people experience during the remote working period? How do they feel about it?
• Did your culture support remote working? What went wrong? Why?
• Could your leaders support their teams even working on a remote basis?
• Did your performance KPIs help? Do you think they are aligned to corporate strategy?
• Did you measure the level of change in productivity of your employees? What is the reason of that change? Can you fix or enhance it? 
• Do you have actionable employee segments for your future workforce strategy? Do you REALLY need to employ “one size fits all” solutions?
• How did your organizational boundaries work during “crisis”? Is there room for improvement in terms of accountability and empowerment?
• Did you determine the “waste” in your processes? Did you restructure your processes to eliminate waste?
• What is the level of process automation? Do you have a prioritized roadmap for improvement and digitalization?
• What are your learnings as an employer? Did you start acting on them?

Answer these questions before building “back to normal action plan”. Going to normal is not just rearranging office floors to keep socially distant. Take COVID as a learning and improvement opportunity to become a leaner organization. Build your future workforce strategy, improve organizational effectiveness and foster employee engagement.