A Company's Perspective: Implementing a Virtual Workforce

Janet Dulohery
Vice President of Human Resources
SE2

It’s no secret that the recent pandemic has tested the resiliency of nearly everyone around the world. Through this pandemic, we have prioritized the health and well-being of our teams and taken a measured approach listening to the pulse of our employees and clients, leading with empathy, and communicating with clarity. We made the decision early on to proactively shift the majority of our workforce to a virtual work model, taking the safety of our employees as a top priority. Our approach was to take an abundance of caution and stay flexible.

Swift and Early Actions Ensured Safety First

Within a week and a half, we were able to successfully enable 95 percent of our staff around the globe to work in a completely remote model. For the few essential workers that had to continue working from our offices, social distancing guidelines were put into place immediately throughout our office buildings. We implemented a face covering policy when an employee was not at their work station. To support our employees’ well-being during this time of uncertainty, our Personal Annual Leave (PAL) policy was adjusted during the global pandemic to add 10 extra days of PAL if someone had a positive diagnosis of COVID-19 to ensure an employee had sufficient time to recover.

We created new channels of communication to keep our employees as well as our clients informed of ongoing changes. With our associates, the emphasis remained centered on providing updates related to the overall situation at each of our office locations. We also created a bi-weekly newsletter one for employees and one for managers to focus on topics that are particularly relevant to working remotely.

We closely monitored reports from country-wide health organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA or the WHO globally and informed our employees and clients of our ongoing precaution and prevention efforts during the pandemic.

Our mission during this time was to maintain a virtual connection between our employees and clients throughout the current social distancing phase, support our employees as they tackle the challenges of working from home, and lead others to better navigate this time. Recently, we asked employees to take a brief pulse survey to better understand the needs of our employees related to the current situation. Of the respondents, nearly 80 percent stated that they feel supported, engaged, and motivated at work and 85 percent said that SE2’s response to COVID-19 indicates that senior leadership cares for their health and well-being. Our work, resilience and maturity over the past few months has demonstrated that large parts of SE2 can effectively operate remotely from a workforce and technology standpoint. We’re proud of how everyone came together across the organization to support this effort.

Return to Office Plans 

Now as another month of working from home comes and goes, we are witnessing countries, states and cities around the world begin gradually reopening businesses but are also seeing rising case numbers in some areas. Our office reopening plans will seek to strike a balance to ensure safety and keep ourselves moving forward as an organization. For the past several months, our teams have worked diligently to establish and put in place country and office specific safety protocols, precautionary measures and policy guidelines to enable our safe return to office. Leveraging this, we piloted a return to office for volunteers at our Topeka office and based on our experience from this and our learnings from other companies, we feel we are prepared to offer the support needed and a safe work environment for our employees.

As the new school year will be starting soon, our working parents are confronted with the challenge of returning their children to school. SE2 recognizes this stress it creates and has formed a Parents Advisory Group to help identify a variety of ways in which SE2 can support its working parents as they grapple with either a totally virtual or hybrid learning environment