I recently attended an interactive seminar on change leadership with a group of 30 or so organizational development experts and HR leaders to explore how real-life organizations will need to address the challenges of returning to the office (or not). We huddled up and discussed actionable change management plans we would implement to make the transition successful. My colleagues in the virtual room had brilliant ideas to share, and it was evident that while there was agreement around some aspects of the change management plans, people had very different ideas of what needed to be done. And they all seemed like really good ideas.

So the first assumption to keep in mind when putting a change management plan together is that there is no one right way to do this.

The past year has been a breeding ground for experimentation. Some actions were taken on a hunch and while some of them proved to be effective, others completely backfired. To start, you need to figure out what it will take for your organization to thrive. It might be a hybrid model but it also might not be. If the hybrid model is for you, it will look very different than it would at other organizations.

Now is the time to gather the learnings. In order to figure out what will work for your organization, you need to identify what has worked so far.

You need to take stock of everything your organization did to manage the pandemic. Here are some of the big themes to explore:

Leadership & Management
A key if not the key task of leadership is to set vision and direction. It will be important to explore your employees’ perceptions of how responsive and proactive your leadership team was in pivoting and setting the direction and strategy for change. While it is important to assess whether or not people found the outcomes of the strategy to be successful, it is equally important to see if people trusted leadership to take action.

Middle management seemed to be a common clog in the execution of many change management plans this year. There were complaints about middle management’s inability to execute on the vision set by leadership for the changes. Therefore, it will be important to assess how well your management did in rolling out plans and determine how to set them up for success.

Technology
Technology is by far one of the most important factors to explore as you assess your organization’s performance. Understand what technology-enabled collaborative teaming, open communication, and efficient work. Ask your employees about what they found to be the most useful, what was detrimental and what was missing. Technology should be a top priority when it comes to budgeting for this change.

Mental Health & Wellbeing
Mental health issues were up by 102% to 305% (Total Brain’s July Mental Health Index) this year, with an overwhelming number of complaints around burnout and fatigue. If your organization offered support services, now is the time to assess how useful your employees found them and what else needs to be done to ensure their wellbeing. Ask employees about their concerns when it comes to returning to the office and gather their suggestions on how to manage them.

Workload
Based on our experience with different clients, this year was one that challenged everyone’s ability to draw the line between work and personal life. We heard over and over again that people worked more than usual and were overwhelmed by the work. It is important to identify what balance needs to be struck and boundaries need to be established between achieving organizational objectives and managing workload.

Communication
When it comes to a change of any sort, communication can really impact how smooth of a process it can be. Aside from exploring how effective communication tools were, it is important to assess the perceptions employees had of leadership’s communication. Ask your employees about how they felt about the frequency, clarity, consistency, transparency, and methods of communication shared with them.

Collaboration
The shift to remote work pushed people to explore new means of collaboration. While it did pose some challenges, it also made it clear that the team can work together virtually, given the right support. Learning the specifics around effective virtual collaboration will be key in determining your direction for change.

As you assess your organization’s performance, you will notice that a lot of these themes ultimately tell you about your organization’s culture. Think about these and potentially other big themes in relation to your organization and flesh out the specific questions you need answers to. Most importantly, try to get as close as possible to the ‘why’.

Tips from Pivoting Organizations

This past year, gC conducted its first ever global State of Culture study to explore how aspects of culture impact organizational performance during the pandemic using our proprietary Culture Mosaic. The Culture Mosaic is a framework that enables us to understand and communicate culture in ways that ensure organizations are equipped to manage change successfully.

While it is of utmost importance to understand your own organization’s performance, there are a couple of key learnings we extracted from our research you can use to set your own strategy. Based on our research, here are some of the key practices that impacted the participating organizations’ abilities to thrive and pivot during times of change:

1) Reassessing company values and having company-wide conversations around how values can be lived out across scenarios of change

2) Defining culture by being clear about how things are done at the organization and the behaviors expected of its people while tying it to the values

3) Reassessing the culture strategy or investing in setting one by:

• Assessing how environmental changes will impact business
• Aligning the culture strategy with the business strategy
• Having a common definition and getting leadership involved in setting it
• Encouraging concepts such as adaptability, collaboration, leadership engagement and openness, vision setting, communication strengthening and encouragement of a growth mindset, trust in employees, and transparency
• Ensuring it incorporates flexibility and agility in a way that makes sense to them
• Becoming more customer-centric – whether they are internal or external
• Defining what collaboration would look like in the organization across scenarios of change and identifying ways and tools to invest in to enable collaboration and achieve success

4) Investing time in setting a capability development needs assessment and strategy

5) Reassessing competency frameworks to ensure they are aligned with changing needs

6) Developing reliable culture assessment and measurement strategies and procedures

7) Contextualizing issues such as social justice to organizations’ different regions of operation

Identifying what has worked for your organization during this past year and incorporating it into these different practices can help set you up for success to return to the office and weather any other change.

Learn more about the Culture Mosaic.

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The traditional feedback process that’s become the norm in most businesses today relies on anonymous systems so employees can feel safe being open and honest with their employers. But there’s something fundamentally wrong if your employees are fearful to be open when providing feedback.

Meanwhile, leaders worry their employees won’t be forthcoming with their opinions unless they’re anonymous, so they default to the nameless employee survey, which limits their ability to follow up with employees who have particularly helpful ideas.

The idea of anonymity is outdated and ultimately unproductive. In fact, the confidentiality can interfere with the accountability you’re looking to build on your team and lead to other unintended consequences, including:

1. Skewed results. In most organizations, a small minority harbors a tremendous amount of anger toward leadership or their workplace in general. An anonymous survey just gives them a platform to vent. When their names aren’t attached, their feedback can be pointed, jaded, and even inflammatory, which can skew your results.

2. Misinterpreted feedback. The purpose of feedback is to gather information to help you make better business decisions. Unfortunately, with unidentified feedback, there’s no way to understand the context of issues that may only affect one department or even one employee. You may end up misinterpreting the data, which can cause you to make the wrong decisions.

3. A lack of follow-up. If a respondent has a moment of brilliance in an anonymous survey, you have no way to dig deeper into his ideas or recognize this visionary for his contribution. On the other hand, if an employee is unhappy about something, you miss the chance to have a productive conversation to identify solutions.

Non-anonymous feedback allows you to initiate that conversation and build upon the feedback loop throughout the year.

4. Limited responsiveness. Gathering anonymous feedback is time-consuming. You must first ask employees to fill out a survey, take part in a focus group, or share opinions in a confidential interview. By the time someone has gathered and processed the data, the information may no longer be relevant.

5. The inability to hold leaders accountable.Unfortunately, some leaders will react inappropriately to feedback, which is why organizations favor anonymity in the first place. Rather than tailoring this process to ineffective leaders, you need to start holding them accountable.

An open feedback system establishes an environment where leaders must learn how to accept criticism so employees feel comfortable being open and honest.

How to Create a Transparent Feedback Loop

If you want to encourage transparency and increase engagement in your organization, it’s time to ask employees to cowboy up and take ownership of their ideas. With that said, you’re also going to have to take responsibility for creating an environment where people feel safe sharing.

Moving from an anonymous survey to a transparent feedback loop won’t be easy or painless, but there are several things you can do to make the transition successful:

• Invest in a platform to gather feedback. Thanks to techie wizards, a variety of platforms are now available to tackle the issue of employee engagement. Software likeOfficevibe, Vennli, and 15Five allows you to gather meaningful feedback from employees on a regular basis that you can use to make critical business decisions.

• Coach supervisors on how to respond to feedback. For this process to work, leadership must understand how their reactions to feedback can shut down an employee’s willingness to participate. In those instances when a supervisor responds inappropriately to feedback, you must be willing to take swift action. If employees can’t go to leadership with their concerns, resentment may spread within the ranks.

• Show employees it’s OK. Such a drastic change in feedback style will be met with some apprehension. However, the best approach is to jump in with both feet and reward people who provide useful feedback. Look for ways to demonstrate how you’re using feedback to implement positive changes so employees see that it’s safe — and even commendable — to be honest.

Removing anonymity allows your employees to become active players in the decision-making process, which can boost their dedication and allow your team to benefit from multiple perspectives. When you open an honest dialogue with employees, you can expand on ideas, gather continual feedback, and arrive at productive solutions to improve your company.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

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