4 Keys to Navigating COVID Return to Work with HR Expert Tina Radeke
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This week we're talking about returning to work during COVID and doings something very different: I’m interviewing a deep subject matter expert, Tina Radeke. She is brilliant in the HR space, has worked for Electronic Arts, Tory Burch, and Nike in HR leadership roles.
This snippet is just a 5-minute preview of a comprehensive 35-minute interview. It’s so good, this was such a great discussion, we highly encourage you to watch the full deal.
Here’s the link to the full 37-min interview on YouTube.
Okay, that's it, I love you, here it is.
G
Do you want to hit us with some high points? Recap in terms of best practices, just sum everything up in terms of what are the points that we hit on?
T
Yeah. I'm happy to recap things. I think for me, there are four key things to remember:
Number one is lead with flexibility and transparency, whether that's communicating with employees, whether it's designing policies, those should be the filters that you're running everything through right now as a leader.
“Create [COVID] policies that are thoughtful, defensible, and consistent, and that are primarily focused on the work or the job, not on a personal circumstance.”
Number two, is that as you're designing policies for a post-COVID office environment, that those policies are thoughtful, they are defensible, and they're consistent, and that they're primarily focused on the work or the job, not on a personal circumstance.
Number three, as you start to get into more sensitive topics like vaccines, whether you're going to require them or not, or certain accommodations for people, those are conversations that you want to have HR and either your legal partner or a lawyer who's familiar with your business as a part of those conversations to consult.
“It doesn’t mean that you have to accept and accommodate every opinion, but you have to recognize that people are just coming from different places in their experience and the pandemic.”
And the final point, which is more of an overarching reminder, and we've touched on this periodically throughout this conversation, is this moment in time and this experience that we've gone through collectively in the last year, is probably the closest we've ever come to having a work environment intersect with people's personal views, people's political views, people's views, whether they're based in religion, their views around medicine. There's so much crashing into each other in this moment. And so as a leader and as an organization, you have to create space for that. It doesn't mean that you have to accept and accommodate every opinion, but you have to recognize that people are just coming from different places in their experience and the pandemic. And whether that is rooted in something they've always believed or whether it's rooted in the experience they've had in the past year, people are just going to come at this from a different place. And so this is essentially a giant exercise in change management. And so allowing for that, and leaning into the principles of change management as people come back to work, is going to serve you well.
The worst thing you can do in this moment is just pretend none of this ever happened and just force people back into business as usual.
“The worst thing you can do in this moment is just pretend none of this ever happened and just force people back into business as usual.”
Business is not usual, that doesn't exist anymore. And so leaders are going to have to lean into the soft skills that allow them to recognize personal differences. They're going to have to create space for people to feel different things. And they're also going to have to be really clear with their employee base about what is okay at work and what is not okay at work. And if something is not okay at work, what are the ramifications or the consequences of that?
So that, again, I bring you back to the point around flexibility and transparency in everything that you do, because this is going to take some time for people to adjust to being back in the office and to being productive in that type of environment when they're so used to such a completely different way of working.
G
Where as much as immediately, everybody's working from home now, it was such a huge shift and disruption of how we work, bringing people back to the office is also another huge shift and disruption, "Now, I'm used to sitting on my couch, and I got to take a nap for minutes every day during my break," and it's such a shift again.
So, having some grace, and I think important what you said, because people on a personal, individual, religious, whatever level, political, are clashing.
“This is a time to extend some grace, how do you treat people you disagree with?”
It's also an important reminder that this is a time to extend some grace, how do you treat people you disagree with? And I think that's so important to culture and laying those ground rules and with what you said, what's acceptable, what's not? How do we treat other people that we disagree with and have a conflict with? And being very intentional about those behaviors and how we show up.
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