HR During A Pandemic

This year has seen the most extreme of changes to the way in which we all work and interact with our teams. The human resources department in many companies has been the backburner of ensuring a seamless transition into pandemic work culture. From ensuring that furlough was adequately incorporated to planning safe coronavirus secure return to the office arrangements for employees, HR has had a pivotal role to play this year.

As we see the development of new rules, legislation, and schemes, HR will indisputably be regarded as one of the most important functions aiding businesses. In light of the economic and other hardships that many businesses are dealing with, the smooth and somewhat ‘normal’ running of businesses has and will continue to come from human resources. With the concerns surrounding the coronavirus – one of which being job insecurity, human resources will be the one stop for employees dealing with mental health worries, as a place for them to voice any concerns and gain support. HR ensures that the culture of organisations is balanced and does so through performance management, training and development, recruitment and onboarding and making sure that all the values of the business are integrated in practice. A positive culture in a workplace is arguably one of the most fundamental attributes of a business. Given that HR is in charge of staff and their retention and training, it seems as though they are the ones in charge of ensuring the right type of person is brought through the doors and adding to that positive culture, as it were. Having this level of authority would likely ensure that there are no clashes and unfavourable situations in work.

HR will also be the strategic mind behind the long-term developments after Covid-19 where companies decide to not go back to pre-pandemic setups or choose to switch indefinitely. During the entirety of the Covid-19 crisis, the human resources function has supported businesses in making strategic choices regarding employees and safe working practices. Clearly, as emphasised from the pandemic, a strategic and strong HR function is fundamental when dealing with unforeseeable events. Currently, the HR function may be working tirelessly on employee engagement questionnaires or adding policies into handbooks which do not have vital importance on the grand scale. It is therefore worth bearing in mind that these tasks could be distributed to other staff members or the development of digital alternatives for HR tasks could be the resolution to such matters. During the height of the pandemic, the digital alternatives for HR proved to be notable and effective measures when dealing with the transition into furlough and other coronavirus related elements. For example, there is software now that can deal with payroll and payslips electronically taking a lot of work off human resources individuals. To adequately address recovery plans and the deal with the aftermath of this year, the critical minded HR function will require underpinning support from organisations to ensure it can continue providing strategic and effective help.

Without an adequate HR function working with a company inappropriate behaviour would not be properly addressed. Not doing so could well lead to protected disclosures which gives away sensitive information to the employee. Although HR primarily protects the business and is there to help it deliver on its core strategy it cannot ignore grievances from unhappy employees purely because the person complained about is valuable to the company. This would be incompetence on so many levels. However, it is often not as simple as purely going to HR and then the issue being resolved as it is true that many complaints (those that are not enough to amount to an action against an individual) do get lost in the abyss due to the structural constraints in place for HR staff. It is therefore arguably more prudent to obtain HR support from a consultancy rather than having an in-house function

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