Employers – your people need you! As this current pandemic lockdown widens to impact over 12 million Australians living and working in NSW and Victoria, now is the time to be stepping up and doubling down on efforts to look after your team, working together to get through it.
Whilst some employers have felt the pinch of the pandemic more than others, there are some ‘basic principles’ that every employer can do to ease the challenges for their people and most don’t cost a cent – and they speak volumes about an organisation’s values and culture.
This is how some of the best employers are supporting their people balance work and family through the lockdown….
- Communicating to their people that the health and wellbeing of their employees and their families is of paramount importance, first and foremost
- Providing information on how to access important mental health and DV helpline information to those who may need it
- Responding to employees who are ‘in crisis’ and creating a ‘care plan’ to support them through it
- Providing paid vaccine leave
- Ensuring people have what they need to work from home
- Being understanding when family interruptions disrupt normal work patterns
- Employees needing additional flex time to manage home schooling and caring is respected and accommodated where possible
- Providing more autonomy to set start and finish times around individual needs
- Redistributing and sharing team workloads to ensure no one suffers unnecessarily
- Helping employees prioritise work in order of importance
- Strictly limiting meetings to only those that are essential to combat zoom fatigue
- Team check ins: buddying people up to check in to make sure colleagues are ok
- Providing ‘downtime’ days – allowing people the opportunity to catch their breath, giving time and space necessary to work at their pace free from a barrage of zoom calls and emails.
What can you do to support your people when they need you the most?
We’d love to hear what your workplace is doing?
