Pathways Towards the New Normal

HR is evolving from staff administration to acting as peers with senior management as an organization are reconsidering their business models as remote working has become entirely normal, and predictably it will not be the same as it was before the heath crisis.

 

HR managers can guide employees safely towards the new normal with a strategy that must be deployed as employees return to their physical offices and essentials must be established to emerge successfully from the heath crisis.

 

HR as a Strategic Partner of the Organization.

HR managers has become to special role for employees, from first responders and trusted advisors to coaches and motivators. And also be a strategic partners for the organization management.

 

Cornerstones of the New Normal

Developing New Capabilities

As working remotely will be entirely normal in the future, employee flexibility, adaptability, and teamwork will be of importance to and organization. HR practices should drive the need to develop these skills.

 

Physical and Mental Health

With remote working environments, employees’ physical and mental health will continue to be highly important for HR departments and handling issues such as online fatigue will be new occupational hassle for HR departments.

 

Diversity and Inclusion

The ability to work from anywhere will increasingly open up new job opportunities for culturally diverse employees all over the world. And HR needs to think about how teams made up of very diverse employees can collaborate effectively and smoothly.

Back Into the Office

As employees gradually returns to regular office work, it won’t be the same as before. Small talk with a face mask, Hand sanitizers next to the coffee machine, and etc. will be common thing in offices. The pandemic will impact on how people collaborate at a fundamental level, including office design. For this HR managers need to prepare and develop strategies for getting employees back into the physical office.

 

Applicable Strategy 

Hygiene precaution

• Provide adequate supplies of sanitizer and face mask.
• Ensure that desks, light switches, door handles, etc. are sanitized regularly.
• Provide for alternatives to employees using public transportation (e.g. bicycle and scooter rental services, car sharing)
• Develop hygiene guidelines for handwashing and social distancing.

 

Reorganizing the office

• Decide on how many employees are allowed to work in the office at any one time
• Organize shared spaces such as meeting rooms suitable for pocket meetings with small groups.
• Decide on what departments or teams will return first.
• Decide on who should return to the office right from the start.

References

The Impact Of The Coronavirus On HR And The New Normal Of Work (no date). 

Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2020/03/31/the-impact-of-the-coronavirus-on-hr-and-the-new-normal-of-work/ 

(Accessed: 1 June 2021).

Are you ready to meet the HR challenges of the ‘new normal’? | Randstad (no date). 

Available at: https://www.randstad.com/workforce-insights/talent-management/are-you-ready-to-meet-hr-challenges-new-normal/ 

(Accessed: 1 June 2021).

3 Ways HR Is Defining the New Normal - HR Daily Advisor (no date). 

Available at: https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2020/04/30/3-ways-hr-is-defining-the-new-normal/ 

(Accessed: 1 June 2021).

Top Priorities for The HR Function to Adapt to the New normal - BW people (no date). Available at: http://bwpeople.businessworld.in/article/Top-Priorities-for-The-HR-Function-to-Adapt-to-the-New-normal/20-06-2020-289256/ 

(Accessed: 1 June 2021).

How to Measure Productivity When Working from Home

 

While remote working allows organizations to reduce overhead costs to a certain extent, With the COVID-19 health crisis, transitioning to remote working is the default option for most organizations around the world.

 

Since organization employees are no longer in the operate in the office premises, many organizations are finding different ways to measure their productivity. Following ways can be used to measure the productivity of employees who are remote working. 

Weekly Sprint (Task) Completion Rate

Measurement: Amount of work accomplished in a week

Criteria: Compare rates between work completed before and after work from home directive in a given sprint cycle.

Remote work productivity can also be measured by the tasks that any individual completes in a week. This can be done at a time-boxed interval assigned for completing a specific task.

Organizations can also use productivity apps to assign tasks, prioritize them, and monitor workflow. These tools help in measuring the speed of work completion, and by identifying performance gaps of work completed in physical workplace vs. work completed as remote work.

When it comes to how employee productivity is measured when working from home, accounting for the number of tasks completed vs. unconcluded tasks, and the quality of work completed through weekly audits by appointed peer review teams.

Schedule Variance

Metric: Understand the current situation of projects it is running behind or ahead of the scheduled time and budget constraints.

Formula: Delta of planned budget and actual cost for work completed.

Schedule variance is a productivity measurement for managers in an organization. This measures the difference between the planned schedule and the actual schedule.

Ideally, the output value of schedule variance should always be positive to ensure that the allocated tasks are running ahead or within schedule. When working from home, schedule variance should be calculated on completion of pre-planned milestones. And, if negative outputs are identified, amendments to remote working teams will be applied accordingly.

 

180-Degree Feedback

Metric: Gathering anonymous feedbacks from other employees regarding their colleagues.

Taking feedback from colleagues on their team individuals is an effective way to understand how they contribute to business continuity during COVID-19.

The team members that are working towards a common goal know who is putting in how much effort. This is achieved by sending surveys to individuals to rate their peers on various performance measuring parameters commonly using either rating scales or checklist.

This helps in understanding loopholes in performance while remote working in organizations.

To understand how to measure productivity when working from home, focus on the following parameters:

This also helps in holding employees accountable over teams or departments. And, when organizations engrave accountability in the work culture, people will automatically track the time spent on the assigned tasks.

 

Lead To Win Conversion Rate.

Metric: Percentage of potential business leads that gets converted into organization customers

Formula: Divide total business lead follow-up by awarded projects into 100.

The remote working trend is the way forward for most businesses due to the COVID-19 outbreak that led to the lockdowns globally. The chain of events further led to an economic downturn that impacted organizations and its workforce around the world with fewer business leads and fewer investment opportunities.

Businesses need to keep a keen watch for new business opportunities. This can be achieved by setting feasible targets for sales and marketing teams or departments during challenging times and resuming to standard targets once the pandemic situation out of the current critical state.

Keeping a close watch on how the incoming business leads are being nurtured. This can be done by analyzing the frequency of emails sent, the scale of marketing and sales efforts, the response rates,.

Customer Satisfaction Rate

Metric: Measure the quality of products and services offered by the organization.

Formula: Divide positive responses by the total responses received from customers and multiply it by 100.

The customer satisfaction metric is a data-driven result based on scores received from customer surveys. This captures unbiased responses from customers that is used to analyze the quality of products and services provided by the organization while working remotely, This can be achieved by sending monthly surveys to customers.

This survey can comprise performance parameters where the organization's customers can rate the satisfaction level for services and products consumed by them. If the rating is lower than what it was before facilitating remote work, the organization needs to put more focus on corrective measures.

References

How to Measure Productivity When Working from Home (no date). 

Available at: https://www.netsolutions.com/insights/how-to-measure-productivity-when-working-from-home/ (Accessed: 30 May 2021).

How to measure productivity of remote employees working from home (no date). 

Available at: https://www.hivedesk.com/blog/work-from-home-remote-employee-productivity/ (Accessed: 30 May 2021).

How To Measure Remote Employee Productivity (Metrics, Tips, Tools) (no date). Available at: https://biz30.timedoctor.com/measure-productivity-employees-working-from-home/ (Accessed: 30 May 2021).

Keep Employees Engaged and Motivated when they are Working-From-Home

 

Measures taken by organizations to stand against the global health crisis from affecting the business, this has an effect on almost all employees as realization that ‘work’ is not a place. During this global crisis, organizations have risen to make a move towards mitigating the effect on the organization. Most organizations are equipping themselves to continue business-as-usual by suddenly shifting gears and adopting work-from-home practices.

V5 Model of Employee Engagement

V5 Model of employee engagement incorporates five major elements of employee engagement. These are: value, voice, variety, virtue and vision. Where value and voice elements are discussed in the context of employees, while the rest three are discussed in context of organization.

Value: considering the fact that employees of an organization as a vital asset and value their efforts, loyalty and commitment to the organization. This may include optimism at work, respect at work, interaction and recognition (Demerouti & ten Brummelhuis, 2012).

Voice: providing an opportunity for employees to raise their concerns and issues without fear of being judged and negative impact (Rees et al., 2013). Continuous feedback, supervisor’s support and cooperation, and inputs on procedure and policies are a few ways that can productively amplify employees’ voice (Saks, 2006).

Variety: scientifically designing a job that uses a variety of skills, knowledge and expertise to have a higher degree of creativity and innovation and thus enhanced employee engagement (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). Variety in terms of autonomy, significance, task variety and challenging jobs can reduce psychological distress and raise engagement level (Christian et al., 2011).

Virtue: having a moralistic mission that supports ethical values for employees, customers, shareholders and community. Organizations having virtue clusters like affection, trust, justice and harmony can develop a humane work environment where employees will be more engaged.

Vision: a clear and comprehensive stated goal of an organization that it strives to achieve in the future. Brevity, goal clarity, abstract yet challenging, desirable goals are a key feature of a good vision of an organization to develop an engaged workforce.

 

In global context organization are using strategies to keep their employees motivated and engaged.

 

Regular check-ins:

Regular check-ins with employees are a must when working remotely to ensure that your remote teams are on the same page regarding their work duties.

 Video meetings:

Even though the chances are that employees have to attend lot of conference calls and meetings while working remotely, face to face communication is a more effective way to get all the remote team members on the same page for this reason employees can get engaged during your video meetings. These meetings should be short and everyone who participates in this meeting should contribute to core purpose of the meeting. And each of your video meetings has to have a clear purpose and timeboxed.  By rotating the roles of each participant in the meeting we can keep everyone engaged in the videos call.

Online team buildings

While the most suitable way for team building activity is onsite and with physical presents of the team member, with the currently social distancing regulatory imposed this cannot be achieved. And organization are finding ways to effective ways to do this online.  There are many different online activities and games organizations can use to help remote employees get to know one another and build stronger connections as trust is one of the key elements in achieving team goals. Following are few online activities organizations are facilitating to fulfill this activity.

1. Company culture workshop
2. Hackathon
3. Online board games
4. Quiz
5. Gaming session
6. Karaoke or movie night.

Reference

9 Tips for Managing Remote Employees (no date). 

Available at: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/9-tips-for-managing-remote-employees/ (Accessed: 30 May 2021).

8 Biggest HR Challenges for Remote Employees | BuildFire (no date). Available at: https://buildfire.com/hr-remote-employee-challenges/ 

(Accessed: 30 May 2021).

State of Remote Work 2020 (no date). 

Available at: https://lp.buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2020 (Accessed: 30 May 2021).

Remote Working During the Global Pandemic Situation

  

The COVID-19 global health emergency has evidently caused severe destructive effects on the global economy. Businesses and governments throughout the globe are constantly attempting to overcome the challenges faced by the pandemic to minimize economic downturn and avoid total economic collapse. With lockdowns, curfews, the working from home culture became a norm on a global scale. This approach promotes good health and security of employees in organizations that dose their business in the Information Technology sector.

In an IT sector organization, human resources are arguably the one of most important departments in the business. But modern workforce environments have created lots of HR issues and inefficiencies. More specifically, companies are having trouble overcoming the remote employee challenges of HR.

Models of Remote Work

There are many ways an organization can customize a virtual workforce. Featured here are the six primary remote work models to consider when deciding which workplace type will be most effective for your organization.

1) Fully Remote – Asynchronous

In a fully remote work model, an organization does not have an office. Staff might occasionally get together for meetups and retreats, but not at any permanent location. Everyone works remotely. At an asynchronous, fully remote organization, employees can live (conceivably) anywhere in the world; their communication and work are independent of time constraints. Their time zones don’t matter because the organization relies on asynchronous communication to keep work moving forward. Work could theoretically go on around the clock if employees live in multiple time zones around the world.

2) Fully Remote – Synchronous

Fully remote organization, employees must operate within core working hours though out the organization. This approach is more practical for timely communication, meeting scheduling, and member service if members live in the same time zones. This approach puts a higher emphasis on real-time interaction than the previously discussed approach.

3) Hybrid

In the hybrid remote model, part of the employees work in the office almost all of the time, and another group works remotely nearly all of the time. Organization management decides where employees are to work or provides the employees the options of choosing their desired workplace.

4) Partially Remote Work

In this approach everyone is required to be present at office for fixed number of days filling a certain capacity of work force present at the office. Commonly this is done in roster based approach. (Ex: a member of a particular team is required to be at office during the first week of the month after that until the next cycle he/she can work remotly.)

5) Remote-First Work

In this approach employees spend the majority of their time working remotely while coming to office for occasional meetings or other operational needs. Mostly this is practised for those who need access to special equipment or meeting rooms based on the nature of their task.

6) Office-First Work

In the Office-First work model. emoplyee are expected to treat their primary office location as their work place the and working remotely is an option provided to the organisation employees by approval of there department heads. As a common practise in this approach employees are expected to spend a minimum number of days or hours at the office premises doing their assigned tasks. 

An overview of different perspective can be identified as below, both from HR departments perspective and Employee perspective.

Challenges Faced by HR Departments

1. Employee Engagement
2. Remote Workforce Communication
3. Attracting and Retaining Talent
4. Providing Employee Self-Service
5. Poor Accessibility
6. Training and Development

Challenges of Remote Working for Employees

1. Managing Your Own Schedule & Time
2. Blurred Line Between Personal & Professional Life
3. Distractions
4. Reduced Supervision & Direction
5. Communication & Coordination Challenges
6. Unclear Performance Metrics
7. Social Isolation

Reference

How People and Companies Feel About Working Remotely - Visual Capitalist (no date).
Available at: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-people-and-companies-feel-about-working-remotely/ (Accessed: 20 May 2021).

8 Biggest HR Challenges for Remote Employees | BuildFire (no date). Available at: https://buildfire.com/hr-remote-employee-challenges/
(Accessed: 21 May 2021).