One year after the pandemic, health and safety protocols concerning the administration of COVID-19 vaccines are more flexible. Employers are now looking into a return to the office workplace. Is this a good idea, or is it too soon to return to normalcy?
In the United States, regulations and policies are still a significant concern of employers seeking to return to office spaces. The challenge is navigating through these regulatory waters while also ensuring the health and safety of employees. Technology and innovation are identified to be major tools to aid in this transition.
However, employers must consider another perspective – their employees' mental health and its impact on working conditions. Addressing mental health in the context of the workplace and working conditions is vital. Effective leadership strategies and management structures would be a good entry point to establish good mental health.
In this newsletter, we dive into the importance of having a good workplace experience and the importance of the workplace safety culture in this post-pandemic era.
The Importance of Workplace Experience
In essence, workplace experience refers to all of the experiences an employee goes through in any given organization. Good workplace experience is key in ensuring employee retention/loyalty, productivity, mental health, and profitability.
Focusing on technology, communication, and collaboration is a must, especially during the digital age. Millennials are in the working-age brackets, and the Gen Z population is slowly entering the workplace. The experience overall must be productive, engaging, and enjoyable. The desire for growth and learning is strong among the generations mentioned before, and businesses must prioritize this mindset to create a stimulating workplace or working environment.
We must avoid unreasonable amounts of workplace stress. It is stressful when the demands or pressures are excessive, confusing, vague, unclear, or simply not part of the job description or role. This causes harm to employees' physical and mental state, ultimately leading to a group of individuals with low morale and low productivity levels. Management and human resources must heavily guard against workplace stress to optimize the employee experience for everyone involved.
The Workplace Culture and the Value in Integrating a Workplace Safety Culture
The workplace culture is another important concept. This refers to the main characteristics and attributes of the workplace. As opposed to the employee experience, the workplace culture represents what the environment and working conditions feel like, taking into consideration co-workers, supervisors and bosses, and the environment. This culture plays a decisive role in job satisfaction and productivity. Having a great workplace culture is essential to ensuring that employees have great employee experiences.
An important subset of the workplace culture, especially during these times, is workplace safety culture. In general terms, safety culture is putting all potential harms and hazards to a minimum. Despite the projected costs of adhering to protocols promoting the workplace safety culture, there are several benefits in the long run, including:
Preparedness
Decision-making
Accountability
Stability
Employee Retention
Regulatory Compliance
What Should Management Deal With First: Workplace Strategy or Change Management?
In these health-conscious times, it is difficult for organizations to find aspects of their business that they need to or prioritize to keep everything afloat.
In one of our interviews over at YouTube, we spoke with Cristina Herrera, an innovator, strategist, people-centered change enablement expert, and founder of Cristina Herrera Consulting LLC. She talks about the major adjustments needed due to the pandemic and emphasizes looking after employees financially and psychologically. They discussed a lot of important points in the interview, including the following:
The essence and two definitions of change management and how important it is to consider in these difficult times
The space you create for your people, and preparing your people for that space
The meaning of workplace strategy and its relationship to change management
If you are interested to know more about Cristina’s views and insights regarding change management and workplace strategy, check out our interview by clicking on this link:
What does the workplace look like to you right now? Are you used to the changes at this point or would you still prefer a return to the pre-pandemic situation? How has management helped the organization transition to this post-pandemic working paradigm?
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