Re-board, re-integrate, or both?

Workforces have never been so highly dispersed – whether they’re furloughed or working at home, once rock-solid teams are now highly fragmented.

The ‘New Normal’ is gradually starting to emerge – but while we’ve stopped waiting for a neat and tidy ending, how do we bring our teams back together again?

This won’t mean the same thing for any one business, or worker. De-furloughing might mean returning workers to a physical workplace, or shifting them to online working as a standard. Currently at-home staff might be coming back into an office – you might even be bringing in new critical hires, that you need to slot into unexpected ways of working. They will need to be included in teams with as much consideration as they would have had they been sitting at a desk beside them.

Or, you might be facing a situation in which nothing will be changing at all. If you had expected to be returning staff to offices by now, but now find yourself taking a longer view of the situation, you still need to find a way to reintegrate your people. Life in limbo has to come to an end.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just about ensuring that the work that needs doing is being completed. This is about ensuring that employees feel supported, re-assured, valued and communicated with. Addressing wellbeing, anxiety, and resilience need to be top priorities for everyone to move forward.

For too long, employee engagement has been considered a ‘nice to have’. We know that employee engagement has a huge impact on business success: low engagement means high turnover, with lost skills and wasted investment. But at a time when many business leaders are focussed solely on staying afloat, keeping staff onboard with organisational goals can too easily be forgotten. This can be a crucial error, when research has found that companies with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by 147%.

It’s also true that every person will have had a unique experience of life under lockdown. While many may be raring to get back to work, others may be apprehensive of safety concerns, or have experienced mental health difficulties during time off. Leadership needs to focus not just on business goals, but on the people they will be relying on to achieve them. Failure to recognise that may, during an unstable jobs market, seem acceptable now. But delivering a positive and rewarding employee experience now can build long term engagement, that will drive forward future success.

Capita has developed a digital tool focussed on worker and manager communication and engagement. Personalised to each role and able to support the challenges of returning, realigning, and reintegrating teams, it offers the user a highly experiential approach. Holistically and comprehensively linking people related services into one easy-to-access portal, it not only aids you with returning workers, but also rebuilding fragmented teams and potentially disengaged or anxious and concerned individuals.

Using the best of technology and human interactions to unite your teams and organisations under new ways of working, it can be linked to your People services or supported by ours. Tying into new innovations in mental health and financial wellbeing, it covers all the bases of employee experience. We are fully prepared to help your resolve your challenges however best suits you, adding extra value and solving your challenges as required.

Working with you to understand your organisational complexities, we’re able to bring together a range of add-ons, wrapped together to meet your employees’ needs. Supported restructuring and de-furloughing, employee financial wellness and resilience assessments, empathetic leadership and employee engagement can all be brought together comprehensively. You can continue to embed your company culture and values, while using data science to predict, personalise and drive businesses performance to best-ever standards.