Know the 4 Things to do With Your People
It’s NOT Cost Management
Culture and strategy define the crux of the People Management response to the coronavirus pandemic. The basic focus of the HRM response during the coronavirus crisis is strategic transformation, not cost management. It is to embolden and empower organizational readiness for the inevitable recovery. Companies need to maintain job security by retaining jobs, engage employees, unpack and embolden communication, balancing the needs of the employee and business to inspire morale with empowerment. The critical role of Human Resource Management (HRM) is to make the organization stronger and ready for the post-crisis future.
1) Leadership Over Fear.
Employees live with an unprecedented state of fear — fear for their own lives and their love ones’, followed by job loss and income insecurity. Some CEOs boldly stated their “duty of care” to employees and enacted “shareholders come last” policy; others quickly retrenched and laid off workers to feed their hungry self-interests. Exceptional leaders cut their own salary/perks and promised job security. Employee safety and well-being become topmost corporate priorities through social distancing and health monitoring measures.
Employees and stakeholders demand a new playbook for a sustaining business continuity. Compassion and charity will not last. A renewed corporate vision for sustainable business recovery is also needed to provide direction, focus and to inspire, motivate and embolden employee commitment in the present for the future.
Business leaders must redefine a wider meaning of business performance given their current crisis experience in a post-CORVID19 world. New leadership models are needed for more sustainable growth in the future from innovative leadership with breakthrough innovations with regard to HRM, stakeholders and the renewed marketplace.
2) Employee Engagement is Critical.
Employees face stay-at-home and work-from-home mandates, reduced and staggered working hours, pay freeze and reductions, as well as increased domestic tensions from spouses, parents and children confined together at home. Employee Engagement embraces personal and problem counselling as well as providing stress relief, mental health and emotional support, life coaching and conflicts resolution; daunting as it were to do all these essential HR tasks through tele-communication apps from remote offices or home.
The only viable and key effective Employee Engagement strategy is to “Communicate, Communicate, Communicate”.
Open communications and discourse will innovate new ways and thinking to cope with a changed world post-COVID19. Employees should explore the opportunities for multiple income sources from self-employment coupled to full-time jobs. Employers should encourage and support outstanding staff as free-lancers and self-employees taking on assignments from non-competitors.
3) Redesign Work Process and Organisation.
Post-COVID19, many companies will realise that they need less or no office space, fewer on-site employees and discover many jobs are actually redundant or unnecessary. Tele-commuting and teleworking, as well as outsourcing HR, finance and non-operational tasks, employees sharing with neighbouring non-competing companies can be part of a “Distributed Office” strategy, whereby workers telecommute and telework from home or wherever whenever. Re-design business and work processes. Deploy suitable technologies, upgrade technical capacity and human capability to obtain better efficiency and greater productivity. Review/Rewrite job descriptions to merge or eliminate jobs, creating new ones, as well as construct/design fresh online and experiential learning programs and delivering them in time and before for the inevitable recovery.
Re-engineering the organization is an essential task of HRM during these COVID19 times. The HR Professional must quickly become familiar with the company’s business and marketplace if he/she had not already done so. The task of future disaster readiness in pandemic proportions now lies in the hands of the HR Professional who has often avoided his/her critical role as the corporate strategist in continuous monitoring and scanning of the operating environment.
4) Thinking the Unthinkable.
“Business-as-Usual” (BAU) is gone and will never return. It is “Business Unusual” (BUS) now. Through strategic reformulation, HR shall embolden and empower the re-engineering, re-wiring and reconfiguration of the Company’s business and value offerings canvas, review its critical staff profile, redraw manning levels and reconstruct structural configurations, work systems, technology deployment, people policies and practices such as staffing, performance management, rewards and compensation, working hours and supervisory management practices for the benefits of doing and getting more from a much leaner workforce.
Post-COVID19 HRM has to initiate and create opportunities for ideas exchange as part of talent management to generate “unthinkable” and “impossible” innovations for all types of risks associated with a sustaining business continuity.
Scenario planning for executives across all mission-critical functions has become compulsory to assure and ensure that the recent disruptions to logistics, supply value chain, markets, customers’ satisfaction, people and production would be promptly engaged and remedied. The playbook for many companies in their many disaster recovery and business continuity exercises quickly became obsolete in the onslaught of the current pandemic whose scale was unthinkable and deemed improbable.
“Never Again” should companies be caught flat-footed and unprepared by other unseen and unforeseen assailant. For sure, the coronavirus will return again but would you also be prepared for others deadlier and more sinister? The strategic role for the HR Professional has never been better defined and described in more graphical terms.
Here is a good and almost Free Reference guide to A Blueprint for Working Remotely During a Crisis. Indeed a handy book to have as you guide the HRM response to the coronavirus pandemic.
