FINAL WORD

Steve Vatidis , Executive Chairman at Massachusetts-based Smartway2 , explains how companies can ensure employees can stay safe in the office , despite continuing problems with COVID-19 .

office to bolster economies with recessions , caused by the pandemic , looming . Many businesses responded by opening up once more to employees who are once again collaborating much more easily than on Zoom , Teams and other remote platforms .

However , to do so safely , businesses need to make data-led decisions made by senior execs at C-level . Enter the CIO .

The call to return to work has been answered by some employees with hesitation , unwilling to venture back to the office for a variety of reasons . Worrying COVID statistics are far from ideal for employees who thought they were approaching workplace normality once more .

CIOs , who need to provide the communication platforms all employees expect , now have a tough gig . They are tasked with evaluating the situation , specific to their organisation and making sure it can not only open safely but can adapt quickly to meet the evolving needs of the organisation and the employees as official guidance changes .

Luckily , this is straightforward with the right technology providing factual information on employees , their workloads and their relationship with the workplace . CIOs are in fact vital to ensure employees are able to return to work safely .

Champion a bottom-up approach to workplace returns

When forming a strategy , as a general rule , the employees who most want to return to work are those who should be in the office . But these may not correspond in all cases . This is where a trade-off has to be made between top-down , management-directed , return to work schemes and bottom-up , employee-initiated plans .

82 INTELLIGENTCIO www . intelligentcio . com