Any solutions that companies use to encourage social distancing and other measures in a post-lockdown workplace must be “friendly” and “human-centric”, listeners of a webinar heard yesterday (21 May).
Speaking during the fourth of the IWFM’s ‘Navigating turbulent times’ webinar series, Raj Krishnamurthy from tech solutions company Freespace told listeners that it was important to be transparent with employees in a way that assuaged their anxieties.
He said: “For instance, many suppliers are coming up with solutions to help with social distancing. I'll say one thing [about that], whatever people, whatever companies do, they need to make it friendly for the employees.
“There is a friendly way of presenting it and there’s an unfriendly way of presenting it. There’s already a lot of anxiety and, you know, it's OK to over-egg a little bit in terms of what you're doing, and it's also important to communicate to the staff that it might be their perception that we are over-egging it, but you're doing it [communicating clearly] at a higher standard for everybody else so that it's easy for people to appreciate what is happening.”
He added: “So I think there has to be some human-centric consideration in the design of how you go about deploying both technology and non-technological solutions in the workplace and that's going to be quite important in the early days."
London region chair Cathy Hayward, Ravi Bhatnagar from Anabas, Allison English from Leesman, Simone Fenton-Jarvis from Ricoh, and Krishnamurthy discuss the strategic, technological and practical elements of the return to work in the webinar.
The IWFM also has a coronavirus resources web page to help guide, inform and support workplace and facilities management professionals during the pandemic. Please click here to take a look.