Human Resource (HR) professionals play an important role at the apex of any organizational hierarchy. In the pre-Covid era the HR department acts as a bridge for all employees and provides centric needs of any organization. HR professionals are the people who know how to manage the workflow of the company by ensuring every single person is motivated and working towards company’s policies. The situation changed drastically in the Covid 19 period.
HR department was to understand the realities for need to “working from home” and assist seniors and team members to adopt and devise options to address concerns. The ultimate goal was to get everyone back on the same track to achieve team goals for objective of the organization.
The idea of “working from home” has become indispensable and Incidentally all employees in the organization found it easy to transform digitally and implement their operations without difficulty. HR’s responsibilities was to establish a common ground for the employees from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and facilitate them with the necessary infrastructure, thus making remote working smooth for them.
For HR the prime concern was in setting up work continuity and handling the daily tasks with the best possible outputs and Diminishing employee productivity and keep the employees motivated to enable them to deliver their best.
First step initiated was to assist the CEO constitute five groups with team under respective Group Heads including HR. HR head had four team members and assigned one member each to the respective group head to assist , facilitate and coordinate the virtual meetings.
The top priority for HR was to ensure safety and health of CEO and top management taking care of their own health and model self-care for their teams. HR designed medical sheet to obtain health report from each head about their teams and give feed back to the paneled doctor. Support system to meet contingencies was created as needed. HR pooled all resources, the capabilities of heads and team members and make aware each one the role and need to reach out to others to overcome the crisis.
There was need to keep all on the loop, the Head of Departments, team members and CEO to communicate decisions and priorities on regular intervals. to the entire body of constituents.
The most difficult task of HR was to convey the news of laying off employees in order to keep the organization running. It was a challenging moment to handle your feelings of guilt and sadness? How should you deliver the news when you can’t meet face-to-face? What should you say to your employees who remain? And what can you do to manage fear about your team and your own future?
