Digital transformation in every organization has gained focus. Future skills and workplaces are seeing a paradigm shift. The crisis has given rise to distributed leadership.
“Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is for certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm is all about” – Haruki Murakami
These words make me reflect on how we will not be the same person when the COVID-19 crisis gets over. It has compelled us to reset as a society, as a nation, as an economy, and most importantly as individuals. Some interesting facts reinforce how our pace of change and adoption was already moving at a fast pace. Airlines took 68 years to gain 50 Mn users, whereas Facebook took 3 years, Twitter took 2 years, Pokemon Go took 19 days and Angry Birds took only 3 days!! We were constantly innovating, changing, and adapting to new products and technologies. COVID-19 crisis only intensified the need and pace across the world. This crisis is unique as it’s an unchartered territory having ramifications on health and well-being coupled with the economic downturn.
We can see a clear shift in Corporate India’s way of working and thinking. Organizations are reimagining their strategies to focus on innovation and new service offerings. Contactless customer experience is gaining significance. Organizations want to be resilient and not just efficient to survive. The gig economy is coming into the mainstream workforce. Unique ways of talent sharing are being practiced by different industries. Digital transformation in every organization has gained focus. Future skills and workplaces are seeing a paradigm shift. The crisis has given rise to distributed leadership. This has resulted in employees embracing a growth mindset and are readying themselves to be agile and continuously focus on upskilling. If these are expectations of the new world, clearly HR as a function needs to reassess its operating model. Every HR professional who has withered the storm will never look at their job in the same way again.
HR too is adapting to new ways of work and expectations. Traditionally, we are wired to connect personally with employees to understand the pulse of the organization, all that is now digitally enabled. Various AI chatbots are being leveraged by organizations to support HR. As per reports published by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum, owing to AI & Automation, we will see a decline in manual and basic cognitive skills. While there will be a surge in higher cognitive, social & emotional, and technological skills. This is no different for the HR function as a trend going forward. HR has moved away from personnel and administrative deliveries decades ago and evolved to partner and create value for the business. Hybrid roles and agile teams will gain impetus even within HR functions to respond to the ever-changing business landscape. Job descriptions and roles within HR will have to recrafted. Various HR professionals will have to wear different hats to respond to changes.
Be employee experience experts. HR will need to focus on contactless employee experience, powered by digital technologies. Leveraging consumer marketing approach will help in accentuating this experience further. Townhalls, large reward ceremonies and physical connect sessions will all need to be replaced with creative virtual plans. In AkzoNobel India, we used this time to drive several interesting virtual fitness, family, and learning challenges. Simulated a complete Quiz championship
virtually. Virtual coffee sessions and AI have been leveraged to keep employees connected and hear their voices. We saw a huge adoption of such practices by employees.
Business Continuity Support. During the crisis, HSE and HR roles played a very significant role in planning and execution. Since this is a health crisis, many important decisions on safely resuming work need consideration. No one has experience of managing a pandemic, hence HR must rise to the occasion along with leaders to tide over this. Supporting businesses with the right manpower models for the future due to role automation and role-outsourcing will become as important. Leveraging the gig workforce to make your workforce truly variable will assume significance. HR will need to contribute to operational cost savings due to tech-enabled efficiencies and remote working while communicating this change effectively for a smooth transition.
Navigator of future of work and workplaces. Owing to the health crisis, for a long time we will not be able to return to physical offices. A hybrid-model consisting of a blend of physical and digital workplaces popularly referred as ‘Phygital’ will come into existence. The HR function will need to enable the organization in adapting to new ways of working through policies, practices, and training. Supporting an organisation with contemporary approaches to learn, recruit and engage and make it future-ready.
Digital and Data wizards. Digital transformation has been an aspiration for many organizations for quite some time. Organizations have been forced to reimagine how they evolve their workflows and processes differently in these times. HR must innovate and leverage technology to simplify processes, improve employee experience and provide real-time information to deliver effectively in these changing times.
Data analytics will play a very big role in recrafting engagement, retention, policy, or performance decisions. It will help us identify which HR activities employees find valuable, as opposed to what HR thinks is valuable. Some of the questions that are becoming pertinent for the HR function relates to building effortless learning experience and connecting HR technology investments with business outcomes.
Custodians of continuous re-skilling and upskilling. The way we learn and what we learn is seeing a big shift. Earlier it was simple to carve out the learning agenda for the organization. A training calendar was published basis an annual needs analysis. Today, we need to integrate needs emerging from future of work, workforce segmentation, changing role compositions, and evolving market trends and organization strategies. Contemporary ways of delivering learning have taken over the traditional approach of classroom sessions. Gamification, self-paced, bite-size, and customized learning enabled by technology has become the norm. Learning functions must come up with relevant solutions to cater to the ever-changing needs of the workforce.
Mindset and Wellness Coach. Recognition of mental health issues and wellness is finally taking a front seat. While the economy may take more time to recover fully, financial insecurity is already on top of everyone’s list of woes. The recent demise of a leading Bollywood actor has made everyone pause and reflect that maybe a psychological recession is underway. Successful people are succumbing to mental health issues, then its time it forms a part of our strategies and gets the right attention. Mental wellbeing will assume importance equal to personal safety. HR functions need to think deeply about how to address, create awareness, and provide support. Programs focusing on enabling employees to manage stress, be resilient, and embrace change are becoming increasingly important. Concerted efforts are required to advocate positivity and growth mindset in teams and HR will have to play a significant role in enabling this cultural shift.
My personal experience has been that as a function we need to act with dignity, respect, fairness and honesty to gain the trust and faith of employees. We need to be open to feedback from our employees and be flexible and agile to respond to the ever-changing needs of our business and talent. Our processes need to be solution focussed and add value to the business.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house