The pandemic has increased the emphasis on the ‘human connect’ aspect of the HR.
The impact of pandemic on health, economies, and markets is an unfolding story that is complex and fluid in its ever-changing dimensions. One of the biggest visible impacts of the virus has been on the organizations and the nature of workplaces. As the coronavirus spread invisibly across the globe, nation after nation has declared lockdowns, and organisations have scrambled to comply with lockdown restrictions while striving to keep operations going. Work from Home became the immediate solution to business continuity.
Agility, creativity, flexibility – these are the attributes demonstrated by HR in the lockdown scenario. As employees started logging in remotely, HR functions stepped up to transform brick-and-mortar offices into virtual workplaces almost overnight. Guidelines to ensure that employees could manage WFH seamlessly and securely had to be quickly defined and disseminated. In many cases, employees had to be supported with digital infrastructure – laptops, data cards – to ensure the maintenance of business continuity.
The corona virus pandemic has increased the emphasis on the connectivity of humans aspect of the HR function. Amid a rapidly unfolding health crisis, HR functions geared up to provide critical communication on safety protocols, hygiene practices, emergency numbers, list of hospitals, guidelines for quarantining and isolating, and much more. Many organisations went the extra mile to help employees handle stress by setting up online classes for employee wellbeing and motivation.
Employees safety has became the prime concern, and HR teams partnered with other functions to define ways of ensuring safety and social distancing compliance at factories and plants that continued to operate. Regular disinfection of premises, offices, buses, and colonies has become an essential component of keeping employees safe. Due to low supply, procurement of masks, hand washes, and sanitizers was critical.
The corona virus crisis has helped shine a spotlight on the value that HR delivers in keeping employees engaged, motivated, safe, and productive. However, the WFH concept and minimal staffing situation are likely to continue for some time. The nature of the virus and its transmissibility have made it clear that social distancing is going to be the new normal for at least a year. This implies that the pandemic situation will impact HR practices like recruitment, on-boarding, and learning and development. Recruitment will focus on tech-savvy talent who can perform better in a predominantly digital workplace. Processes for on-boarding new hires will have to change to become fully digital. Training and skilling will reconfigure for an online-only mode.
Read more: COVID-19 affecting Recruitment and ways to handle this Unfortunate Situation
Some changes are exciting in their potential for transformation. In the appreciable future, HR plays a key role in redefining, perhaps permanently, the nature of the workplace. For instance, standard attendance and leave policies will no longer be working. Organisations will have to place a higher degree of trust in the integrity and commitment of employees working remotely. WFH may impact decision-making structures because of the constraints of video meeting platforms. Smaller teams may be able to collaborate better and take decisions faster. In some ways, WFH may even be a blessing in disguise. Being able to work from home may help people to balance professional and personal issues better. It may enable more workforce to enter disabilities.
Having larger remote workforces will push organizations to ramp up technology adoption and digitalization, enable dispersed operations, and collaborative functioning. As organizations get more comfortable with employees working remotely, the requirement for office space and fixed workstations may reduce drastically. Organizations may be able to leverage WFH concept to cut costs on real estate and brick-and-mortar infrastructure.
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Many of these changes are already afoot, and organizations have been in a constant mode of reinventing practically every process and policy. The silver lining to this unprecedented health crisis is that organisations are finding new ways to become more productive with fewer resources. Doing more with less is the mantra in the post corona world. When the world changed practically overnight with the corona virus pandemic, organisations did too. The industry is watching the reinvention of the workplace happening before our eyes.
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