Are you struggling to tempt your team members back into the office again? For all the benefits of hybrid working, sometimes it pays to have your team together and operate from the same location. In this article, 1st Formations share their perk ideas for luring your staff back to the workplace.
Social Fridays
Let’s start at the end of the week. Every Friday, stock the office fridge full of beer, wine, and soft drinks, get some snacks in, and then encourage everyone to help themselves to a drink and a bite to eat from a designated time before the end of the working day. You don’t have to stop work entirely, but allow your team to move around the office and mingle.
By adding this routine into your employee’s working week, you are giving them something to look forward to and increasing the chances of them wanting to come into the office on a Friday, a day that is now notoriously quiet.
Free lunch or breakfast
Pick a day (or two) in the week and treat your staff to a free breakfast or lunch. If your team is relatively small, you can go off-site to a local restaurant, or if that’s too disruptive (or time-consuming), you can order the food.
Staff should be able to choose what they want via an internal poll, with different options available each week to ensure everyone’s pallet is satisfied. If possible, to enhance the team-bonding aspect, try to get everyone together so they can eat simultaneously if you are ordering the food.
Lunchtime activities
We’ve just ticked off the food aspect of lunch, but how about hosting different non-work activities during the week to keep your team occupied on their lunch break?
You could hold yoga sessions, call in a language teacher, start coding lessons, launch a book club, host competitions – you could even arrange a mobile hairdresser. It’s all about giving people a reason to come into the office.
Collaboration days
Pick a particular day of the week and use it as your dedicated ‘Collaboration Day’, whereby you hold your regular team meetings, one-to-ones, brainstorming sessions, training sessions and any other meeting types where actually being together makes the process easier and more productive.
Working from home can be excellent for certain tasks, but, despite the technology available, nothing beats getting everyone in the same room when it comes to collaborative jobs.
Whilst this won’t necessarily be a draw to all team members, you will find that it appeals to the more team-focused employees.
Help out with childcare
Over the last few years, your employees with children will have developed new childcare routines to fit in with working from home. Sometimes these childcare arrangements can be the only thing that’s getting in the way of them returning to the office.
Consult with these team members to see how you can help them. Perhaps tweaking their working hours (or even working week) slightly will allow them to spend more time in the office. Alternatively, if childcare represents a significant issue for a number of your workforce, you could look at providing childcare vouchers, starting a relationship with an existing nursery, or for larger businesses, even opening up your on-site nursery.
Pet support
The pandemic led to a surge in pet ownership, particularly dog ownership. This may have added a complication in getting your people back to the office, as the dog owners amongst your team could be reluctant to leave their pooches home alone.
Why not help out by making your office dog-friendly? Not only does this provide a practical solution for anyone concerned about leaving a dog on their own, but it could also boost team morale and give the dog lovers in your business another reason to step away from home working.
Thanks for reading!
So there you have the perks you could offer to get your team back into the office. We hope you have found this post useful as you endeavor to get your employees back under one roof for at least part of the working week.
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