HR MANAGER’S ROLE IN POST COVID-19 ERA

Dr.S.Sundararajan, Associate Professor-MBA. SIMS

Managing the physical and emotional well-being of employees is important for corporations post COVID-19. The pandemic has changed the roots of the employee engagement mandate, HR leaders are playing a crucial role in this journey they must be flexible, agile and more innovative with the changing times.The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated several workplace changes related to work and workforce, such as a remote work culture, virtual workplaces and the increasing use of technology, which are happening all at once. The COVID-19 crisis also causes shifts in talent management.

In some organization with Managers support HR’s are working with the executive leaders to ensure policies are created and/or updated. They also ensure protective initiatives are integrated into the organization’s operations.The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging employee and managers. Thus, HR must also ensure the mental and physical safety and well-being of employees at all levels is integrated and effective. One of the key challenges faced by the organization is the survival of the business, while dealing with knowledge and social loss when people are laid off temporarily or permanently.

The hard part is to remember the soft side of the HR business: the employees are people and they need managers’ support. In the future, they may want to bring the people back to work and they also want the employees to remember the organization as a great employer, HR  also has  to remember that some changes in the workplace may also continue (i.e. remote work)

Building Resilience and Agility – Building resilience and agility in organizations is very important when change happens, both internally and externally. HR should play a key role in this.For example, IT/ITES organizations were quick to adapt to the remote and flexible working during the current lock down. The current lock down has forced these organizations to make a seamless transition from being office-based to home-based without affecting productivity or morale.In some cases, organizations needed to realign their company values. Similarly, restaurants adapted their business models by operating a take-away service, retailers shifted to an online-first model, and some companies started to manufacture their own hand sanitizers and face masks.

Innovating the Work Environment Post-Covid

In a post-covid environment, how will remote work be transformed permanently? HR Managers believe some manual operations may have been automated providing them to implement in a time when it was not thought of. HR professionals and leaders has revised job descriptions to incorporate more automated technologies by providing employees further opportunities for remote work while continuing to provide customer service without negatively impacting performance or the mission of the organization.

HR Managers must ensure the employee is emotionally balanced and remains psychologically connected to the organisation as well as the work being delivered.HR is confronted with developing strategies that will keep the employees engaged and attached to their job despite all that is going on around.The pandemic has given rise to a widespread and deep existential crisis.People are fearful, uncertain, isolated, fatigued, experiencing dysphoria on an unprecedented scale. They are being exposed to distancing and masking which ushers in (including at the unconscious level) seeing the other as a threat, a carrier of something dangerous, and thus to be avoided at all costs.

They are also typically subjected to a command – control – coerce leadership and management style that trickles down from governments to supermarkets and malls, to their own organisationsand the focus is on medical and economic factors. The psychological factor is either not understood or is paid slight attention.Many organisational leaders see clear productivity and cost-saving benefits in remote work-from-home and also emphasize technology.

Given this background, for me the primary role of HR (indeed – all leaders and managers) is to show understanding, empathy, compassion; to leave behind clever business jargon and corporate speak; and to introduce warm communication and support with and between employees (offline and online).

There are numerous way that this can happen – but the first steps are

1. Recognize the primary employee needs.

2. Be human and compassionate.

3. Act together with employees to address the needs.

This approach will impact healthy on the organisationor business requirements. Hence HR Managers or Professions have more responsible to protect their workforce for increasing their productivity and profit to raise the value of the organization in the post covid-19 era.