Episode Description
As organizations start to re-open its officers, leaders are looking for answers on the best ways to approach their re-entry strategy. The reality is the right approach can look different day-to-day with a focus on being flexible responding to employee feedback.Hollie Delaney, Chief People Strategist of Zappos.com joins this week’s bite-size to share the various elements she thinks leaders should consider when developing a re-entry strategy. With over 12 years of experience, she’s been instrumental in providing Zappos.com as the best place to work for all employees. In helping answer the question around re-entry, Adam Weber also weighs in sharing why he thinks the term re-entry may be the wrong word choice altogether.
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Episode Transcription
[00:00:03] Insights listeners, Nicole here. And thanks so much for joining me for this week's Bite Size Insights. Empowering people leaders with best in class information.[00:00:11] In 10 minutes or less, while many of us are still remote, leaders are starting to think about what reentry into office spaces could look like from our own experience and amplify the conversation around the right approach looks different. Day by day and is a constant innovation. Well, that's why we asked Hollie Delaney, the chief people strategist for Zappos Zappos.com, to come and share what she thinks the various elements leaders should consider when developing their own reentry strategy. Hollie has more than 12 years of experience with Zappos helping lead the charge of changing the traditional company structure to one based on trust and distributed authority. She has been instrumental in making Zappos dot com a best place to work for all employees. And having her join us has really been a treat. I don't. Weber also weighs in on how he thinks about reentry and why that might be the wrong word choice.
[00:01:02] Take a listen.
[00:01:07] I think it's important to really, no one listen to employees. Their lives have been turned upside down right now. And, you know, they're just getting used to what the new normal is and now working this switch and change things up again. And people adjust to things in different ways. And if there's never really a one size fits all for people. And so I think the biggest piece, at least for me, is really listening to your employees and see what is what do they want and what is the best way for them to participate in this. So when we started considering this, I was saying our offices are built for not social distancing, but for collisions and said we're not set up to to be far apart. We're set up to be close together. And so that was a concern for our employees. And so as we were thinking about when do we come back to the office? Should we come back to the office? What is this new normal look like? We asked our employees, like, what do you want to see happen? And what came back from our employees is they want to hybrid's said they want a time so they can come in and coachwork with employees, but they want to still be able to work from home because they're finding that they can gain more focus and are more productive in certain ways, working from home. That being in the office environment that we had. And so we're really just going off of really listening to what they want, how they want to see things and seeing how we can work with those ideas to make things happen.
[00:02:34] One of the things that is a bit of a misnomer is the term reentry because it applies going backwards. And I'm not quite sure that's the right word. I don't I don't think we're headed back. I think what we're doing is we're moving into a new reality, a new season of moving forward. And so kind of at the highest level as a leader, when you move into to new season, some of the questions I'd ask is like what needs to be different in this new era of our business? For us to operate kind of in this new reality, what aspects of office life need to be rethought in a way that and reimagine in any other is what? What are those core elements that need to stay the same? And I know that's really high level, but I think by flipping your mindsets is why the old maps, exactly why it was triggered by that that poem? Because I think if we try to think about how to get things back to where they were, we're going to miss an opportunity for innovation in this season to do new things.
[00:03:35] Thank you so much for joining us on this week's Bite Size Insights. And we're curious what the organization is thinking about when it comes to the work environment postcode.
[00:03:43] Give us your feedback at emplify.com/questions. That's e m p l i f y dot com slash questions.