Building a Business Plan for Returning to Office: Challenges and Solutions

This report discusses the challenges faced by Bedford Town Residency due to remote working during the pandemic and proposes a project plan to return to office. It highlights the importance of implementing best practices in the office space and prioritizing employee well-being.

Business Project

Executive Summary:
This report is about the problems faced because of remote working during the pandemic
times. There is a project plan developed to cope up with these changes and make the staff work
from office again. It is important to implement best practices in the office space.

INTRODUCTION
Business project is the project which is made with the aim of attaining the business
objectives. Business project is used to attain the demanded criteria for the projects. It has defined
end date and are not repeatable from the ongoing tasks. It is the management of internal projects
taken from the company's strategy and objectives (Bos-de 2018). Bedford Town residence is a
housing association which is aimed to provide proper housing for local community having focus
on providing assistance and support to the vulnerable individuals. The company operates from
the center of town Bedford. It is going through many changes and problems while working
remotely because of pandemic. In this report is about the building a business plan while finding
the key elements of project life cycle and developing a business case.
PART - 1
Bedford town residency is a housing association which is owns and manages some
number of district and housing which are divided into general housing and supported housing.
General housing works with several teams within the organisation and each team is supposed to
track and manage the issues within that areas. In the supported housing, same type of systems are
used which are helpful in managing the facilities. The pandemic brought in many changes within
the organisation. One of such major change was the lock down restrictions which made the
employees work from home basis (Sandhu, Shamsuzzoha and Helo, 2018). This decision was
taken in considerations of the safety of staff members and security within the residents. With the
increase in the pandemic situations, remote working become the only option left. The
communication as well as collaboration tools used by the Bedford town residency organisation
for its employees are not sufficient and suitable for having a long period of remote working.
Most of the employees were frustrated with the remote working situations as there was no proper
communication. There were few employees struggling to manage the technological
advancements. All these points lead to creating communication issues.
Pandemic has brought in many disruptions in the business world and day to day activities
of the companies such as Bedford town residency. The management of the company decided to
let their staff work from home and the staff who are required to work on site will work with
proper security and maintaining all the safety rules. Employees have expressed their frustrations
due to no proper internal communications and many other problems. Employees were unhappy

with this state of working. The reasons to stop the remote working includes being unhappy with
the constantly connected nature of the remote working and constantly being available on the
emails at any point of time during the day. They felt to have an email overload with an increase
in number of unmanageable levels. Employees felt that email was a bad way of communicating
work and putting in repair requests for the facilities which are managed by the company.
Moreover, there was a lot of arguing during the time of video calls and major failure in resolving
the issues related to communication and collaboration. Many of the employees did not had
access to laptops and computers, especially for the team working on site (Polonsky and Waller,
2018).
In addition to this, many staff members raised problems related to being in isolation.
There is an increased feeling of being lonely and cut off from the people. It is important to have a
sense of trust in the employees and are not happy with the use of monitoring and remote
surveillance tools which are used to track their activity. In the customer service team, the main
issues raised is about the mental health support which is important because of the increasing
stress and uncertainty due to the pandemic situation. They are also suffering from lack of
motivation as not having a face to face communication and working and living in the same place
can lead to decrease in the level of motivation (Jones, 2019). The job of customer service team is
to meet with the customers but in remote working, they contact with the help of emails and
phone calls on occasional level. This is resulting in decreasing the motivation levels and having a
feeling of shifted and lonely. Due to all these reasons, it is important to make the employees
work from office and come back to the normal life again.
Lock down restrictions will not remain for a forever and the staff members will have to
return to the office world. It is important for the company to plan the return of the employees,
while considering the well being of all the members. The management of the company can begin
with bringing back the young employees of the company back in the office at first. They have
comparatively more immunity than the older staff. Older people are more prone of getting virus
and calling them afterwards will provide them with more time to be prepared physically,
mentally and emotionally. With the availability of vaccines, it is easy for the employees to come
back to the office and work with the old and normal working routine. This transition from work
from home to normal office can be stressful for many people. Some will not be able to work well
because of grieving the loss of their loved ones and many are suffering from financial problems

and mental health issues. It is important for the management to be sensitive towards employees
and lead the way with empathy (Alipour, Fadinger and Schymik, 2021). This will help in making
the transition easy, fulfilling and meaningful.
From the issues faced by the employees, main was the mental health problems because of
the fear of virus, taking care of hygiene and safety. It has brought challenges in mental health
with constant amount of anxiety leading to depression. To handle these mental health problems,
the management can make sure that the work place is clean as much as possible. Employees will
be nervous about coming back to the normal schedule and thus, it is important to anticipate the
communication and make safety as major priority. This will help in reducing the concerns of
employees and therefore, making them taking less stress. Safety ca be increased with the help of
taking various measures such as having health screening, following the Covid protocols of social
distancing and checking their body temperatures on every day basis. This will help in
transitioning back to office a bit easy step.
The company can also provide therapy and counselling sessions for the employees
struggling with their mental health. The company will allow only half staff to start working from
the office and the slowly increase the number of employees. With more and more employees to
get fully vaccinated, returning to office is becoming more feasible than before. The office will be
opened in different phases allowing half of the staff and only the ones who are vaccinated and
developed an antibody against Covid virus. This number of employees will eventually increase
while considering the situation. There will be proper screening of each employee coming to
office. The company is allowing any employee to work from home if they are feeling sick or are
exhibiting symptoms of Covid (Kicheva, 2020). No employees are allowed to form groups of
more than 5 people in the office premises. The management of Bedford town residence will
communicate the back to office plan in a proper way to avoid any breaking of rules and
protocols. The company works with many different team and each team must not have more than
half employees working in the office.
Parameters Weight-age Option - 1 - remote
working
Option - 2 - working
from office
Health Risk 5 5*2 = 10 5*4 = 20
Costs 3 3*1 = 3 3*3 = 9

Productivity 4 4*2 = 8 4*4 = 16
Quality 5 5*2 = 10 5*5 = 25
Time 4 4*3 = 12 4*5 = 20
Total 21 43 90
From the weight score card model, it can be seen are there are different parameter which
are important for the company and its employees. These parameters hold a different level of
value for the company. From the above score card it can be seen that by considering all the
parameters according to their value with regard to the Bedford town residency, working from
office is a better business option as it has the highest points when compared to the two options.
While considering the health risk factor, it can be seen that when the employees are working
from home, they are less exposed to the virus and more when coming to office (VAIDA and
ȘERBAN, 2021). However, in the factors such as quality of work and productivity of each
employee is better when working from office as there are not issues of less motivation and
feeling isolated in office because there is more face tot face communication. Working in normal
routines will improve the productivity and working at different place will make them be in
working spirit around the work place.
Remote working can be a preferable choice for lifestyle for few employees however,
working from home can blur the line between the serious working place and personal life of the
employees. Working from office and being surrounded by the colleagues will help in attaining a
healthy work life balance. It enables the employees to have clearly divide personal matter from
the work life. It also allows to have face to face meetings within the organisation which also
helps in having in person brain storming sessions with the tea members (Plebankiewicz,
Juszczyk and Kozik, 2019). Working in office helps in encouraging the environment of creativity
and innovation in the work space. Video conferencing is an alternate options for all this but in
person engagement sparks more and better initiatives. It helps in creating a safe space for the
employees and a platform where they can share experiences and socialize with one another. It
creates a vibrant company culture. Every activity hosted in the work place is done in a highly
engaged way which will motivate the work force. Organisational culture is believed to have an
influence on the performance of the employees and increased revenue growth. It helps in

producing more creativity and employee retention. Culture impacts the well being of individuals
in the work place while ensuring more engagement and being passionate about their job roles.
Remote working is an innovative solution in the business world. Working with same
traditional space leads to creating many problems and challenges regarding increasing the quality
of services and cutting costs in order to make the business offer some of the competitive rates.
The major disbenefits of working in an office includes having regular distractions (Yilmaz and
Antmen, 2019). Being working in the office space leads to communicating with a lot of people
which may lead to create a more noisier work environment which can break the concentration of
employees. There is no room for privacy. In this case, an introverted employee will not be
comfortable. There is also an increased level of stress as when working in office an individual
feels more under pressure by the high staff and colleagues. This decreases the productivity as
well as capacity to work.
Making the employees work from office will happen in 2 to 3 months to get the staff run
normally from office. Once the staff is coming to office, they will take time to settle to the
normal space after working from home for such a long time. So time over which benefits are
released are 6 months.
Reflection
I have a learnt a lot from all these sessions. These sessions were made me feel very
enthusiast about the learning process and become curious to attain more knowledge in the area of
business project (Salmon, and et.al., 2019). I was very attentive in the session which made me
understand all the concepts. In addition to this, the sessions were very receptive. In the initial
sessions, I get to learn about the management and producing outcomes from influencing.
However, in this week I had problems with communicating with my colleagues. This was
because of the technical errors such as problems with microphone and not having a proper
internet connection. In order to overcome this issue, I will test my internet connection prior to the
session and avoid having such problems as there were few things left in confusion because of
such issues. Later I understood the concepts about the structure of the organisation and ways to
manage the work by dividing in different work functions and promoting more coordinated work.
I built in more team work qualities along with working in an effective way. Moreover, the
communication level was increased in both verbal and non- verbal form. The approach for

working in a team is very beneficial in order to work together and in an effective way. In the last
week, I learnt about the operations and different transformation models which makes the
classification of operations easy. It was a well- organized team work along with good form of
communication I had with every one. A lot of people working with me were open towards the
team work condition. And all these techniques were proven to be beneficial for us.
In the forming stage of the Tuckman's team development stages, there were team formed
within the organisation and every one including me were excited and positive about the
upcoming weeks. Leaders guided us to the learning process and everyone was at their best
behaviour. In the next stage of storming happened because of the communication problems due
to the technical problems. Every one felt frustrated about learning such important matter on a
video conferencing with poor internet connectivity. A proper guidance was required in this stage.
Team member made sure to have a proper internet connection and resolve their issues regarding
their doubts and this lead to norming stage. Here, people tries using their team working skills and
being more calm. In the performing stage, the team attained progress and I was confident about
what all I have learnt. I developed team working as well as problem solving skills in the process
of working in this project.
S. No. Goals Activity Importance Timeline
1 To improve my
leadership skills
This will be done by
learning from the past
experiences of some great
leaders. Understanding
the roles of leaders.
Leadership skills are
important as it helps in
becoming a good
leader and bring out
the best capabilities
from the team
members. It also helps
in motivating them.
6 months.
2 To improve my
problem solving skills
This is done with the help
of joining courses which
will develop new
situations which will push
to take steps to solve the
Working within a team
leads to creating many
problems when
working with so many
people. It is important
4-5
months.

problems. to have problem
solving skills in order
to create more happy
workplace and become
more confident
employee.
3 To become more
organised individual
This activity includes
having to make checklists
ad involves the sorting
and categorising activity.
Organisational skills in
the workplace will lead
to eliminating an form
of ineffectiveness
which slows down my
working efficiency and
make me work multi
tasks easily.
3- 4
months
CONCLUSION
It can be concluded that Bedford town is facing many problems while making the
employees work remotely. Bedford town residence is supposed to put more focus on the mental
health of its employees and start supportive programs and initiatives. This is why it is important
to plan the employee to return to office for work. Team working skills are very important in a
work place. It helps in building coordination and developing the problem solving skills.

REFERENCES
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