Re-fresh the “Re-Start”

What are we going “back” to?

In a recent “Every Other Wednesday” interview, Steve Browne, SHRM-SCP, Chief People Officer at LaRosa’s Inc. and author of HR on Purpose, suggested that the past often looks rosier than when lived in the moment. Further businesses should be looking at a “re-set” rather than an return “back to”…what was perhaps not working in the first place. 

Hosts Michael Kerr, Richard Hadden, Sujay Nath, and Jeff Tobe say the pandemic has offered up much to be overcome which required businesses to pivot strategically. Why then would we want to lose that momentum? We have had to change behaviours into performance and in order to do that, we have changed, altered, modified our environments, opening up possibilities. And since there never was a unified normal before, what will be normal in the future will be up to each business to set.

Better outcomes, Steve says, comes from enhanced communication, improved relationships and focusing on how to foster those within teams. Speak to people like adults whose time is as valuable as your own.

Steve reminds leaders that there is only a defined subset of employees who were ever able to work “remotely” so focusing continually on that subset creates barriers to those who have continued to work as they always had—on location. To only emphasis those able to work remotely allows for “exception-based” policies, which in turn creates silos and interferes with effective team communication and culture building. Instead, he challenges, deal with the exception as an exception and don’t make it an edict.

For those companies who are people focused, they will go beyond the “why” to the also ask the questions behind the question—the “what” we do and “how” we do it. This is what Steve says is “people” thinking, instead of “systems” thinking which will build and foster trust. 

Remember, Steve says, if you trusted in the person enough to hire them—trust them when they are hired to do the job.

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