As of this week (13 December 2021), people in England should now work from home if they can, as part of the Government's Plan B guidance to curb the spread of Omicron. This change brings England in line with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

This comes at a time when furlough has ended, and with many employers trying to return their workforce to full strength, albeit in a tight labour market.

This may be a moment then for employers to dust off their ‘Return To Work’ survey - something many firms used to assess how employees felt about coming back to office and factory locations earlier in 2021. As long experienced (euphemism for being old!) market researchers, we’re against suggesting standardised templates for such surveys, as we believe every workplace is unique, and staff attitudes may be contextualised to established workplace culture there. That said, standard templates do provide some ideas of questions and prompts that you could adopt or adapt, such as this one.

Another thing to balance here is survey fatigue - many organisations have polled their staff quite a bit already in the last 18 months, and adding another lengthy round of questions may draw a low response rate. So if that’s a concern for you, consider a Pulse Survey of just a few core questions around topics such as team connectedness, need for support (e.g. child care, looking after dependents, etc.), and always take the opportunity to ask “What more can our organisation do to support you in working from home?”

Something we do strongly advise considering is gathering extra demographic profile data about your employees that your firm may not hold already, but which could really help with responding to staff Covid concerns about returning to the workplace. The table below is an example of some possible data to capture, courtesy of employee engagement software firm CultureAmp (still probably the best we’ve used for this kind of task).

Not all of the above examples will be relevant to your company or market. And that’s a key point here - whilst all survey questions to staff should be asked sensitively, any personal data requests are, under GDPR law, only legitimate if they are necessary for the specific task of the survey itself (so don’t be tempted to add extra profile data that you might be interested in but is not strictly relevant to return-to-work planning). Keep your Legal team in the loop on what you are doing here, though, because every work context brings its own considerations.

This latest Government change of advice will frustrate some companies keen to keep their staff in the offices. For others, returning to at home ways of working will leverage arrangements that are already tried and tested now, with many workers still not back full time in the office anyway.

Wherever your organisation lies on the spectrum of normalising work-from-home, staying in tune with how your employees feel about it will support staff engagement and help retain a happy workforce.

As work-from-home restrictions return, how can employers tune in to staff concerns?