Back to work, back to office or working from home? How to keep everyone happy!

Here at Synergi’s head office, we’ve had a busy and somewhat fraught week, armed with screwdrivers, cleaning equipment, PPE equipment, plastic screens, and hammers.  A whole day was spent dismantling desks and break out areas, carrying them up, and down, stairs, and re-assembling them all in some sort of arrangement that meets the new return to work safety guidelines.  It has been exhausting.  And what became very clear quite quickly was that we can’t have everyone back in the office, not all at the same time – even if they all wanted to.   So the next challenge was to figure out who to have back in the office, when to have them and for how long, how to monitor those who want to come back, how to make sure our team feels safe and happy in the office, how to keep communicating with those who either don’t need to work in the office, but can do so at home and are happy to, or those who just feel safer working from home and how often we need to check this is all still the case or if we need to change things up, or down.  Phew!  It makes your head hurt just thinking about it – and we bet we’re not the only ones.

Fortunately we had sufficient supplies of good quality caffeine, so we all sat down to scratch our collective heads and figure this out (via MS Teams naturally).  We’re digital evangelists after all: collaborating, automating processes, simplifying the complex and manually tedious and coming up with a digital solution is what we do! We needed to treat ourselves like a client.  What would we do for a client coming to us with this issue?

In true Blue Peter style, there was a solution we’d developed earlier!  Or are currently in the process of developing if we’re going to be completely honest.

We agreed that a version of this for our own Synergi team would be Very Helpful Indeed.  Although we have far less staff, and not as many locations to take into account, this process can be implemented quickly and simply with few alterations.  We’re now doing just that, with a plan to get people back in the office (if they wish to) within the next few weeks, on a rota system, with no headaches and stress – but perhaps just a few aching muscles and bruised thumbs from all the physical activity!

If you’re struggling with similar process issues, or are wondering how on earth to manage either a return to work or back to the office situation, let’s have a chat.  We won’t help with the furniture re-arrangements, but we can and will help with the processes and communications around it.