Help Your Employees Feel Better Returning to Work

Today, I'm going to provide you with 3 strategies to alleviate and deal with employees' angst of returning to work so you can resume operations while maintaining a safe and positive work environment. That's coming up now on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to Marc Haine Live, where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them work on their business, not just in their business. Hi, I'm your host Marc Haine. We're coming to you live every Tuesday at noon Eastern Time. Of course, you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. And even if you're watching the replay here on YouTube, you can hit the subscribe button and ring the bell. That'll give you first dibs when I bring you some fresh content. Feel free to drop a question or your own fabulous insights into the comment box below so people can benefit from your experience as well. So, let's get on with it. You know, as an owner-operator or a manager, we have to fight an uphill battle of getting back to normal. But what is normal? Personally, I think normal is like a A setting on a dryer. Everything changes every single day. But we are actually in really uncharted territory. We need to get up and operational as business owners as quickly as humanly possible. If you were lucky enough to have employees working from home, you should be in really great shape. I mean, you've been able to maintain operations because your people are working from home. But for those people who require staff to be on-site, This may be a really difficult time for you and for your employees. Their angst of coming back to work might actually be bigger than just the fear of them getting sick. So, before we take a deep dive, I want to welcome our live audience here on YouTube live broadcast. I just want to take a quick peek. And for that, I do need to put my glasses on just to see who's on here. So far, we have 15 people. Sorry, we have 2 people on at the moment. There's no chat. So, welcome to those people who are on. I really appreciate you coming out and supporting my vlogcast. And I hope you get a lot of great information out of today's session. You know, the live broadcast is always a crapshoot of whether or not people are jumping on board and actually following you. And being brand new, this is only my 7th episode of Marc Haine Live, which will soon be rebranded. I came up with the name Marc Haine Live because I couldn't figure out what else to call the broadcast. But if anybody out there has an idea of what this broadcast should be called, then please drop it in the comment box. Send me a message. I'd love to hear your ideas. Right now, I've been working with my marketing my marketing specialist and we're tossing different ideas forward. But so far, it's been a little bit of a challenge figuring out something that's going to be different than what's out there. But yet, compelling enough that people will be able to find me on the World Wide Web, on the interweb as it were. So, before we get started, I want to start the segment off with a Question of the Day. So, our question of the day is, what is your big fear when it comes down to returning to business? Everybody, every one of us has a fear about this restarting operations. It'd be really nice to hear, especially if you're a business operator. What is your biggest fear as you reopen the door and put that key in the lock and reopen it for the first time to customers? While we wait for any kind of comments from people, I just want to just let you know about next week. I want you to mark your calendar for next week's episode. It's episode number 8. We will be speaking with— and I tipped my hand by hitting the button too early. But we will be speaking with Barbara Engelbert McKenzie, Chief Executive Officer with The Business Link. And we're going to be discussing the importance of being open to pivoting and what you could do to pivot. So, it's a really important time for you to be able to consider what it is you can do to make absolutely sure that you can maximize your revenues as you open your door. You're not going to be necessarily in the same situation you were when you closed your doors. So, what can you do to pivot? What are some of the things that you can do in order to push forward into this new reality? Great! You know, in this reality right now, we have We have issues. And Dr. Sanjeev Socklingam with the Centre of Addiction and Mental Health said that the majority of us, if not all of us, has a certain degree of worry or anxiety of returning to work. We basically all have the same questions. It doesn't matter if you're an employer, a manager, or a staff member. Is going to work going to be safe? Will I have access to the right protocols and equipment to keep me safe? Probably the biggest fear is, could I and the ones I love be at risk if I go back to work? The concerns are magnified if the employees themselves have high-risk family members. Or maybe they're immune compromised themselves. Add to that that the employee may be a primary caregiver at home, especially since COVID-19. And maybe they have to deal with aging parents or school-aged children where they're They can also be the homeschool teacher. Bless their hearts. I know it's so tough for parents these days. A recent Léger poll, our poll recently put out said that 39% want employers— sorry, 39% of employees want to work from home throughout this COVID crisis and even post-COVID now. This is a new reality. 36% only want to go to work if it's absolutely necessary. And I'll be absolutely honest with you. The key I think to working with your employees and alleviating the angst that they might feel is going to be communication. It's going to be you stepping up and sitting down with your employees and discussing the reality that they're facing right now. This angst is very real. And nobody knows how it's going to affect them more than the people it's going to affect themselves. Just like you as a business operator, you are trying to do this big push to get reopened. Try to get some revenues in so you can start making your payroll. Start making your rent and being able to pay your suppliers and so on. And start servicing, being in business. You have a purpose. By being in business, you started your business because you wanted to serve somebody. You wanted to be able to provide a service or a product to them. So, it's going to be really important that you take your time and you sit down with your employees. Now, if you have a big— if you have a huge complement of employees, then it's going to be important that you sit down with your managers first. Go through the process with your managers first and then have them sit down with employees as well. So, it's going to be a team effort when it comes to leadership. And leadership really shines, I think, when there are conflict, when there is conflict. That's where you can tell whether or not you have good leadership or if things are being shoved under the rug. So, for the very first point that I want to make as part of 3 strategies, the very first one is that it's important that you directly address the stress the employee is going through. Sitting down with them and figuring out exactly what is going on with them and their lives. What are the challenges they have coming back to work? What are the consequences of them coming back to work for them? And so, you might ask questions like, how do you feel about coming back to work? Do you have any concerns? You can start discussing their personal ramifications of coming back to work and really have that as an open Discussion with them. I think that if you put yourself out there, you'll start hearing some of the words coming out as a response. But I think what's going to be really important, they said that if you wanted to get to the truth about something, you had to ask why 5 times. And so, I would encourage you as people are responding, as your employees are responding to you, I would encourage you that you ask the question And what else? So, if somebody says, well, you know what? I have children at home and I have to do homeschooling. Okay, well, that's great. And what else? Well, you know, we don't too often— we aren't getting— we have to go out for groceries and I have to be out in public. And I'm a little bit fearful of the fact that other companies, even though we might as a company be taking precautions, I don't feel that maybe other companies are taking it as seriously. So, our suppliers need to be on board with us if we're going to come back to work. And then, you can continue on that conversation by saying, oh, okay. And what else? Right? And you ask that question until they look at you and they go, well, nothing else. That's it. Now, you have all the responses. And now, it gives you the fuel to be able to take it to the next step. And of course, then the next step for you is ultimately to be able to provide support. There we go. Take steps to support them. Sometimes the tech doesn't work as much as you want it to. But here's the thing is, oh, I just touched my mouth. I shouldn't touch my mouth. Put a big X. Here's the thing. You are not in control of how other people feel. But you can support them. I believe as leaders, That we have our primary job is to absorb the stress of the people around us, of our team. We absorb that stress. We don't create that stress. And so, in order to do that though, it takes empathy and it takes care. And it takes care with purpose. And for those people who aren't quite sure how to define empathy, empathy is when you put yourself in other people's shoes. There's that great poem from the 1800s that says, walk a mile in another man's moccasins. If you want to see what their lives are like. And so, being able to step into and really connect with the employee and really understand what it is that they're dealing with, then you can end up using phrases like, I understand where you're coming from. I can really put myself in your shoes. I know exactly what that must feel like. Right? Being able to then step in and understand at a visceral level, really from your heart, Right? And as much as you're probably sitting there thinking, I have to open. I don't have a lot of time for this stuff. And I think if you want to be able to move forward, you're gonna need to take this time. And one of the best ways to let people know that you understand what they're saying is to be able to paraphrase. You could say things like, I understand that with your elderly mother living with you that You don't want to risk getting sick or spreading it to her. I can absolutely understand that with what's on the news that we may be facing a second wave and that makes coming back to work really scary. Right? And so, being able to use their words, paraphrase it, and be able to understand and connect. And ultimately, like I mentioned before, it's going to be— it's not going to be about how to connect up here. It's going to be how to connect In here. And then lastly, it's going to be discuss what returning to work would look like. Now, this has to be an open and honest and completely transparent conversation. You have to be able to discuss what returning to work would look like with all the ramifications. Not sugarcoated. Not, oh, we'll see. Right? You really have to put together the plan of what returning to work is going to look like for your employees, as well as what it's going to be like to be able to serve customers. A couple of weeks ago, I did in my previous episode, I put together a risk assessment worksheet. And I encouraged people to download the worksheet and then fill it out. But fill it out with their teams so that your store clerk, your cashiers would fill out this form as well as the people in the back stockroom, or the bartenders, or the servers, or the dishwashers. Excuse me. It doesn't really matter. I think it matters more to have all the different faces and all the different hands in this pot to help define all the different risks because only those people doing the job will truly understand what is going on. So, I think it's important to look at all the different ramifications of them coming back to work and being open and honest with it. Using that risk assessment, you can then put protocols in place. And so then, you can sit down and then talk about expectations. And the expectations are from both sides. It's from the employee. What is the employee's expectation of you as the operator? And what is your expectation as you as the employer? What new protocols and procedures do you have in place? Can you discuss What happens if the employee can't return to work based on their reality and based on your reality? Maybe, perhaps, maybe the best thing is that the employee stays at home. Maybe they can't return to work just yet based on that. And again, we are in this together. If your only motive is, I have to reopen my store no matter what, then as an operator, I think it puts you in a really scary position because you might be tempted to shortcut some of your procedures. You might be tempted to shortcut some of your safety protocols in order to make sure that you make those profits. And I think this is one thing we're going to see in our new reality is we're going to see this challenge of trying to balance my moral obligation to be safe all the time and balancing my need to make money and be able to pay my bills. And so, this is going to be a juggling act for many, many operators. I mean, right now they're talking about— oh, I did it again. They're in the news just recently. In the news, they were talking about the government is not going to be funding the PPE purchases for business operators. And that is a challenge because it means that as part of your operating costs now, you're going to have to have personal protective equipment. For your staff and you need the protocols in order to make sure everything is safe. And I was just talking to a grocery store owner and he was saying that he's challenged. I mean, he's been open through all this and they have been adapting really well. But he says, all the extra cost has been coming out of his operational budget. All the extra costs, it hasn't been passed on. He hasn't gone through to boost up all the prices and everything in order to compensate for it yet. But at some point, he's going to have to. Just like you will at some point. You're going to have to take a look at how you do and what you do. And you are going to have to make decisions on how to pass the buck, as it were. And as much as if you're not in business, you might turn around and go, well, that's not fair. You shouldn't make me pay for it. But the reality is if we don't have margin, we don't have mission. Okay? If we're not making money, Then it's going to put us out of business. And as much as consumers might not think that it's fair that your prices go up because your costs go up, well, unfortunately, c'est la vie as they say from where I come from. And you have to— we have to do the best that we can. I mean, we're not talking about price gouging, right? We're talking about being able to compensate for your new reality and the reality of what it's going to cost to operate a business. So, when sitting down with the employees, it's going to be really important that you sit down and say, okay, well, if you can't return to work, do you have any programs or do you have any programs that— or work-at-home initiatives? Do you have perhaps the person working at home? I mean, I do know that the government right now is subsidizing some Some wages. It's not for everybody. But if you could jump on that program, what does that look like for your employee? And then, if they're at home, is there anything that they can do for you while they are at home? And here's the big hint. You might have to look outside of their job description. You might have to look outside of what they typically do. And so, for that, you're going to need to delve into what are some of the things that they can do. What are some of the trainings that they might need? And so, that becomes another option. Can you offer any kind of training that supports your business and their passion? I was lucky enough when I was running an operation. I had a young lady who was just entering college because she wanted to get into marketing. She had been working for me for about 3 years, was a really great employee. But she had this passion. She really loved this idea of being able to reach people. from a marketing standpoint and take people forward. And so, when she decided to go back to college, we paid for half her tuition. We coughed it up and we said, we want to support you. And as she was going through college, she was able to use our company for all her case studies, all her points. And it helped us through the 2.5 years that she was in the program. And at the end of it, we had a marketing manager. At the end of it, we were able to hire her on and she became our marketing