Post Furlough - Managing the Return

You've got lots of your staff furloughed but you've kept working along. Soon, you'll bring your furloughed staff back, but they've been off work for weeks. What can you expect?

Let's leave aside what the world of work will look like. Assume a mix of videoconferencing and in person working for the purposes of this disquisition.

At the core, your short term mission as a manager/ director is to make all of your staff feel appreciated, either for what they have done in the crisis, or for the gap they left.


How may your staff feel about being furloughed?

Make no bones about it -- you have chosen to tell these people they are not useful or relevant.
If your organization has had to close almost completely, the pill will be less bitter because there will be an obvious reason that there was no work to be done.

However, if you have furloughed some people in your team, but not others (and not swapped them in), and broadly kept working, you may have some explaining to do.
It will help you to be really clear about what you were trying to achieve when we went into Lockdown, because that will make your responses coherent and logical.

• Some of your staff, particularly those who are ambitious or were worried about their positions anyway, will have been hurt deeply. You may be walking into a grudge that has simmered for weeks.
• Let them have their say. Accept that it's not unreasonable for them to direct their despair and frustration at you.
• Do not be defensive and do your best not to be drawn (but don't feel you have to accept abuse).
• Be prepared to discuss the logic as to why they weren't chosen.
• Agree to have a follow-up conversation once everyone is a week or 2 back working, and consider in advance the underlying causes of their unhappiness with you. Prepare honestly to address those worries.
• Consider that the people who are upset about not taking part are the ones who may want to give their all for the company.
• Some of your staff will just have been glad of the break, or genuinely won't care. They will be less challenging, but consider their overall commitment to the business, particularly if they don't have kids. This may be a sign that they're exceptionally well adjusted, but you may want to plan for a time where these people may eventually feel that they have been short changed.
• Some will be relieved that they've been furloughed, as they know they cope badly with change and crises. However, they may have come to feel rejected over the time, and may also be the ones who have coped worst during the period. Watch out for them.

What they may have been doing while not working for you
Your furloughed staff will have been occupied their time in many different ways.  Some will have been productive, filling their time with making, learning, or volunteering.  Others will have been much more passive, spending time consuming endless video content.  And some will have been Coping with Children.  All of them will have had low days.

Remember that this is a stressful time for everyone.  Coping is genuinely enough.  While it may be impressive that one of your team learned a new language, or single-handedly made 4000 facemasks, vaunting this may make some staff feel even more worthless, and others, who have spent their time doing up their cvs and applying for other jobs, will look shifty.

Your job is to acknowledge your team members' varied requirements to be valued, balancing those whose vast achievements shout loudly to look at them, against those who have seen every social media post as a further validation of worthlessness. 
Speak to people individually about what they have been doing, and gauge the appetite for sharing achievements across the group.  Think abut how to provide a platform to discuss anything amazing they've done while furloughed. 

Do:

• Ask your teams what the the best thing was about their time off, and whether they will do anything differently even after lockdown.
• Ask them whether they found any patterns to their days (see my other blog posts) that they can apply to their working days.

How to get people back into the swing of working
It will almost be like introducing the team from a company you've just acquired, but worse!
Prepare:

• Come up with strategies to build furloughed staff into team camaraderie. The smaller team left behind will have bonded, and the furloughed staff will feel left out. Your team will not function well if you allow that to continue. Focus on small team work that will include the furloughed staff, but will be different in structure from the team that remained. Perhaps that will look a bit siloed for a period, but it will pay off in the medium term and beyond.
• Be clear about the team's/ department's goals, problems, and outputs in the short to medium term. Ensure everyone is clear about what is expected from them, in detail, for the first month to 6 weeks back. Check that your managers have got tasks, problems and outcomes clearly communicated. This will take significant upfront work.
• Make it clear what special place and responsibilities each member of staff has.
• Make a point of setting regular meetings, at least for the time being, at the edges of the working day (eg 9:30 and 3:30pm) just to ensure people get back into the habit of your working day. You or your managers can move these meetings (or dispense with them), when everything is swinging again.

When everyone's back:

• Ask furloughed staff what they missed about their jobs, with an "And What Else?"
• Ask people to go back through the tickets/cards they worked on, or the emails they sent before they were furloughed, just to refresh their memories of what they were doing.
• Your furloughed staff may have spent the time learning new techniques or skills. Resist the urge to squash these!
• Your non-furloughed staff may have come up with ways of communicating that have worked well during the crisis, and which they want to continue with. Furloughed staff may be resistant, so make sure they are fully included in the mechanism, and understand why it worked well. There will be a time after a few weeks to reconcile these new ways with the old communication structures and rationalize them. But not at first!
• Everyone has been working from home. Some staff will have put on weight having spent weeks sitting in front of the fridge, so be mindful that they may be feeling less confident when they come into the office, particularly if they've also been furloughed.
• Remind everyone to be patient with each other - Furloughed staff may be desperate to talk (and talk and talk) to anyone and everyone, while staff who remained working may well be exhausted and resentful of all the Rest that the furloughed staff have had. The mix could be toxic, so be prepared with strategies to handle this.

Remember:

• This is not a moment for a wholesale restructure, unless it is completely unavoidable financially. The core messaging in every area has been not to make major decisions in this period, and this is no different. You may feel that your furloughed people haven't bothered to make a difference, but remember that you have told them they are not allowed to make a difference!
• Also, be mindful of exalting the efforts of people who haven't been furloughed when they've just risen to the occasion or especially for done the job of someone on furlough. Openly acknowledge it, and by all means do it in private, but do not broadcast it. Consider always that many of your furloughed staff might have achieved the same if they had not been denied the opportunity.
• It would be wrong, though, to think you won't have learned some things, both good and bad, about your staff and what is truly essential in your department. And your staff will have learned something about you and themselves. It will be natural for you to want to make some changes, but when it comes to it, be hyper-aware of furlough bias in your changes.
• Of course, it's not all about you - some of your staff may come to you with new ideas about how they want to work, or may have put the wheels in motion to not work for you at all.

Points in conclusion:

• Make everyone feel valuable and appreciated;
• Acknowledge, but scale back celebrations of achievements, either in work or "at Rest";
• Establish bookends to the days;
• Dedicate significant time to crafting clear definition and communication of responsibilities and areas to work on in the short and medium term;
• Accept the first weeks will be tough, and everyone, especially you, will need to remain patient, flexible, and open;
• Give emotional space to furloughed staff to let them respond to their feelings of worthlessness, whether that's to vent at you, or tell you about how amazing they have been;
• Hold off on making big changes to your team.