5 Tips for Safely Reopening Your Office

As businesses begin to reopen, great attention is being given to the measures required to keep employees and customers safe. And many of those measures are simple behaviors: washing hands, wearing masks, etc. But those measures won’t succeed unless they become norms. And at the end of the day, the speed with which norms change is the speed with which it becomes normal to give correction. If noncompliance is rarely addressed, healthy behavior becomes a joke. The author recommends several things leaders should do to help reset norms as they reopen their offices. Instruct employees that when anyone sees anyone violate safe practices, they are to remind them of proper protocol with a polite, “Please.” Hold a “boot camp” for employees where they can learn and practice the new norms. Going forward, have them regularly practice the new behaviors, like you would with fire drills. And then monitor and measure adherence.