How the role of HR is evolving through the pandemic
Shifting to a need-driven people-centric approach
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It is heartening to see employees looking up to the human resource department to help them through the crisis; it just shows that they trust we can play the part By Ravi Maithani
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s Betty Bender aptly said, “When people go to work, they shouldn't have to leave their hearts at home.” This can very well be applied to the present state of things. As India grapples with the deadly second wave of COVID-19, the home, office, and heart have been having a tough time staying out of each other. This crisis has brought human resource (HR) professionals across the country together to not just plan, but implement employee welfare activities, to an extent that has never been done before. While hiring and employee engagement would sum up the key roles of most | June 2021
HR professionals, it was not until now that we weighed employee experience over everything else. As per the recently conducted Close The Employee Experience Gap report 2021, around 70 percent agree that employee experience ranks “very to most important” among HR strategies for organizations today. And with this crisis striking so close to home, we realized that it was not just the public healthcare system that needed an amendment, it was now time to put the “human” back in human resources. Here’s how the role of human resource professionals is evolving through the pandemic.
We have all learned our own set of lessons through this pandemic. One of the most important being that it has brought a paradigm shift in thinking in terms of engaging employees. There has been a radical shift from “one size fits all” to people-centric policies and adopting a needdriven approach (including setting up a COVID-19 help desk, COVID-19 emergency back-up care benefit, focusing on mental well-being, adding health insurance for employees and their families, etc). Many of us are crowdsourcing verified leads for COVID resources in addition to parallely running our respective war rooms to assist employees on a realtime basis. What’s most important to note is that these policies and initiatives will change as needs change, and we need to be prompt in introducing them.
Quicker approval of updates to people policies It was mid-February when the second wave hit us, and it took just a few weeks for things to get out of hand and approach the peak. By the time we were trying to ramp
