IT leaders are going to be faced with many challenges as the government starts to loosen the requirements that have been set to try to flatten the curve. It should be expected, and we should all be prepared for our “New Normal”.
Our New Normal may come as a shock to some of our team members who have been bunkered down in their homes. Many team members have not been acclimated to the new norms of 6’ distance, not getting together as groups, and plexiglass everywhere.
Our “New Normal” may also come as a shock to our operations managers, who are going to have to change their day to day operations to maintain some of these requirements. Managers should be prepared for changing expectations, BYOD, request to implement VDI quickly, and many requests for conferencing assets like webcams and headsets.
Many experts believe that a lot of the trends that have been discussed but ultimately was hard to accomplish may become a reality. Are you prepared to accommodate and implement these trends quickly?
Hoteling / hot desking:
Many places have utilized every square inch of available space. In order to accommodate the new normal, you may need to eliminate multiple desks in order to get the space that may be required by law, or just to make your employees more comfortable. One way to reduce desk space is to lose the extra desks. If you look around, you probably have an empty desk or two. You may also be able to reduce desk size when you remove all the personal items.
Working from home / remote:
Working from home for those who can, help you accommodate multiple things such as obtaining the buy in for hoteling / hot desking. Working from home gives you the desk space you need, keeps up employee satisfaction, allows most of your team members to be more productive, and improves attendance records.
One of the ways you can sell the hoteling to your team members is to say. If you are working 3 – 4 days a week at home, then you don’t need to have your desk taking up space. So, the tradeoff is by moving to an 80 or 90% work from home, you would need to move to a hoteling first come first serve desk arrangement.
Employees want to work from home most of the time, but it is also important to remember that most people also like interaction. Try to rotate people coming into the office so at least once a week they can interact with others face to face. Another important piece to working from home is to make sure you have a good communication platform. The platform should allow for interaction and fun with other team members. If you are using a product that has channels, consider making a Praise / Water cooler channel where people can go to unwind, chat about non work-related items and just have fun.