Office regulations after lockdowns

In this episode Mattias and Svea talk about the regulations for offices from a “Post-COVID” perspective when things are slowly getting back to normal.

Guidelines for office work

The regulations around working from home policies have become a bit blurry within the past 1,5 years due to the worldwide pandemic. Of course, there were guidelines in place before COVID, however, most companies adapted quickly to the change and let their people work from home permanently to keep everyone safe. iGoMoon was no exception and after almost 2 years of this uncertain time, Sweden removed all COVID limitations this month resulting in normality slowly coming back to the Scandinavian country. Now it is time for Mattias to think about the future of iGoMoon when it comes to remote working possibilities for his employees. He has been working on completely new guidelines covering this topic.

Adapting to the situation

In the last couple of months, iGoMoon tried to have everyone at the office on Mondays and Fridays in order to start and end the week together as a team. And despite it being a good and forward driving idea in regards to the team spirit, the office simply became too crowded due to the company's growth in the last 18 months. Mattias also adds that even if there are more remote meetings with customers nowadays, there is a higher demand for office space - conference rooms in particular - in order to have these meetings in peace and quiet. Before the pandemic, the team would simply go outside the office to physically meet the customer elsewhere, but now almost every meeting is held at the office - despite it being remotely. People need to join meetings individually with their one computer and can't gather in front of only one screen in order to have a proper and professional meeting. This means that every person who is joining the same meeting still needs to have their own room - in a perfect world.

Team spirit

To solve this problem until iGoMoon moves into a bigger office eventually, Mattias decided to stop getting everyone into the office Mondays and Fridays and rather let everyone pick in advance which days they want to work from home and which ones they actually want to come to the office.
Like this, the utilization of the office space can be planned and a proper workplace can be guaranteed. At the moment there is no minimum amount of days per week or month people need to come to the office, however, an important part of iGoMoon's identity is team spirit and having fun together. If people choose not to come to the office at all then maybe it is simply not the right workplace for them.

Remote work requires even more communication

Another important aspect of the new working from home guidelines is, that people cannot simply decide to work from somewhere else than their home, meaning they shouldn't travel and all of a sudden call in to a meeting from another country e.g. These things are of course possible but it is really important to communicate these things in advance. Also, everyone is obviously asked to join all relevant meetings with their headset and cameras turned on. In that regard, everyone is also responsible for their own work setup when they choose not to work at the office. This is an important part of the policy because Mattias can not be responsible for his employee's healthy work environment and gear (except for their work computer) when they aren’t at the office.
If someone's home setup is not sufficient then they might be required to work at the office instead, where there is everything they need.

💡EPISODE TAKE AWAY
Have clear policies in place, so that everyone understands what they are required to do.

How do your employees prefer to work?