Bringing employees back to work after a break can be a challenging task and needs to be handled with care. This is even more relevant now, as COVID-19 restrictions across the world ease out and offices are reopening for full-time work.
Whether you're a large enterprise or a small business, a streamlined return-to-work process is now a necessity. It fixes the current challenge of bringing workers back to the office after the prolonged pandemic, and prepares you for other situations such as bringing specific employees back after an injury or illness.
In this article, we'll discuss how to manage and support your employees' return to work with a streamlined process. We'll also touch on the specific challenges presented by the pandemic and how to manage the return to full-time office work after working remotely.
While this decade’s biggest break from work will be because of the pandemic, there are several more reasons why an employee may take a long leave of absence or time off full-time office work. Some of these include:
If an employee is planning a leave of absence, be sure you have that process dialed in with this guide to streamlining your leave of absence process.
A digitized return-to-work (RTW) process facilitates an employee's return to the workplace in the quickest and safest way possible. If the break from work is due to an injury, illness, or disability, it enables the employer to manage the issue effectively while still allowing the employees to work.
An effective return-to-work program allows employees to resume working in a way that is appropriate to their current condition while also contributing productively to the organization. It encompasses more than the physical nature of an ill or injured worker's condition — it also includes mental health concerns, workplace dynamics, and general employee well-being.
Automated, streamlined return-to-work programs offer financial and other benefits to businesses:
Finally, a return-to-work process that brings an employee back quickly and without hassle enables the employees to earn an income and preserve their skills, even if they work on a reduced capacity for a while.
The COVID-19 pandemic was sudden and unexpected. Accidents and employee injuries are often just as unexpected. So, the first part of creating an effective return-to-work program is to prepare for such events well in advance.
This can be done by ensuring that you have an up-to-date record of every position in your organization, complete with job descriptions and day-to-day tasks. If an employee's absence in any position would disrupt business operations, you can try to minimize the disruption by training other members of the team to take over the tasks.
To account for disasters and pandemics, a disaster management plan and provisions for remote work are essential. The ability to work remotely may also help individual employees who took an extended leave return to work faster.
Some essential elements of a return-to-work program include:
Other than these general requirements, it might be a good idea to have more than one return-to-work program in place as the specifics may differ depending on whether the break from full-time work is due to an employee injury or a company-wide disaster.
Since something large-scale like a natural disaster would impact your entire organization or even a whole city or country simultaneously, you may have to temporarily shut down normal operations based on the scale of the problem.
With disasters such as a storm or a minor earthquake, the closure may be short-term, lasting a few days to months. But with large-scale events like the coronavirus pandemic, the impact may last longer.
Here's how to bring your employees back to work after such incidents.
Since pandemics impact entire cities, countries, or the world, the most important things to consider are employee safety and government regulations. A flexible plan with the agility to switch back to remote work at short notice may also be important in case of new variants of the disease causing spontaneous changes in regulations.
So, follow these guidelines to create an effective return-to-work program:
In addition to these, keep in mind that your employees are your priority in such a situation. Offer all possible resources to help them cope with the difficult situation, such as mental health and well-being support, paid leaves, and other benefits to support them through the pandemic.
Bringing employees back after a disaster is arguably less complicated than returning to work during (or after) a pandemic. Your return-to-work process in this situation would have to include:
The return-to-work process for an individual employee with an illness, injury, or disability is vastly different from the process to reopen an office after a pandemic or disaster. The program needs to be flexible and agile enough to be personally tailored to the specific employee and their job, but there should also be guidelines in place so that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time.
Here's what you need to keep in mind:
In a nutshell, an effective return-to-work program is centered around the safety and well-being of your employees. It is also agile enough that it can be adapted according to the requirements of your employees and the situation at hand.
Such agility can be complex to manage in a manual environment, with paper documents or forms for every eventuality and inefficient communication with employees through a variety of platforms.
The best way to keep your process smooth yet flexible is to use Pulpstream's Return to Work solution. With automated communication across your teams, flexible digital workflows, and integrations for everything from contracts to case management, bringing an individual employee or an entire office back to work is an easy task.
Want to see how Pulpstream's solution can dramatically increase productivity and reduce costs? Book a free demo now!