Slowly but surely, we are going to return to work soon. The non-essential businesses are starting to plan their reopenings. Although they cannot reopen without the local government and business owners’ final words, one needs to talk with their employees and seek input from the employees before the reopening. There will always be some simple return to work guideline. When you need to seek feedback from your employees, you need to ask them some simple questions.

So here are some questions that you can ask your employees to solicit their inputs on reopening:

how likely are they looking forward to returning to the office?

Some employees had a hard time adapting to the remote work. So, there are people who must be eagerly waiting for the chance to get back to their normal office environment. However, there will also be some people who might have just adapted the work-from-home process. So do not jump to conclusions. Instead, put this in front of the people.

What will be the ideal working arrangement that they will like till the end of the year?

While employees are returning to work or looking forward to it, they might not want to commit to the five working days of work culture. Therefore put a few options in front of them and let them choose. Ask them if they prefer:

• Working onsite full-time all week
• Working from home 3-4days per week
• Working from home 1-2 days per week
• Working from home full-time

You can also ask them if they prefer coming to the office on a rotational basis. It is another great question to ask your employees.

What is concerning you the most about returning to work?

There are quite a handful of reasons why your employees are not willing to come back to work, and necessarily so. Working parents have a significant issue with children, as we don’t have complete access to schools, daycare, and summer camps. Also, some people are too much concerned about their old parents at home and their health. Others may also have problems like:

• They won’t be as productive
• Potentially infecting their peers

And more.

What motivates you the most about returning to work?

Ask your employees about the change and what they miss the most about their office culture the most. Provide them with examples like:

• Their equipment
• They are productive
• They find it easy to collaborate
• Interacting with their workers

As vaccination has been available, how comfortable are they with returning to the office?

With the COVID-19 vaccine unavailable until the end of the year, you should ask your employees how much they are eager to return to their workplace physically. If a few of them report being eager to get back to the office, you can take the plan of reopening your office partially or entirely into consideration.

These are some of the return to work survey questions you can put in front of your employees to understand the situation. As the black clouds of the pandemic are slowly going away from our world, get ready to get back to work soon.