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HR Planning Goes on!

The Global Corona Covid-19 Crisis has impacted global businesses like nothing in recent history. All but the most critical organizations have been forced to close and or experienced employees either working remotely, being furloughed, or even laid off. Hopefully, these decisions were made carefully and with some thought for the future in mind. The impact of the virus and the countermeasures of distancing and shutdowns came quickly and with overwhelming consequence.

John Lennon said it well in his song “Darling Boy;” “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Although the Covid episode has thrown our carefully constructed, organized, and operated plans in complete disarray, the idea of continuity planning was created because disasters do happen and often without warning.
As a business, do you have a starting point with some continuity planning for how to proceed once the Covid isolation and quarantine measures have been removed?

The post Covid world is likely to be quite different and we may experience a wide array of possible changes to the organization’s structure, operating environment, workforce, policies, and procedures.

1. The demands for creative problem solving and effective leadership will be unprecedented.
2. Personal safety and health will have increased emphasis on the chance that the virus might return.
3. Remote working may remain in place for many workers – temporarily or permanently.
4. Having the availability of a large digital foundation for the organization’s operations will be a major contribution.
5. Communication with workers will be another critical capability that must support distributed and evolving operations.
6. With so much of the future in possible doubt, leadership will be a key component of bringing people together, listening, and showing the level of corporate caring.
7. While remote working remains a reality, new measures of security will emerge and need to be addressed through training and testing.
8. Austerity may be essential while revenues gradually return to pre-Covid levels, so replacing lost members of the workforce may be challenging.

As we can see, it’s likely that every dimension of the organization will be impacted and will require action and support from HR. One of the greatest assets for planning the recovery is advanced digitization of company information, especially employee records, including pay and benefits, and workforce tasking. With data immediately available, managers can more quickly and completely develop the plans that are needed. If your organization has already moved to digitize employment records, you have a major advantage in responsiveness and flexibility for post-Covid planning.

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How do you get ready for the take-off post-Covid?

Organizations equipped with suite systems like ClayHR also have the advantage of integrated tools, including artificial intelligence, for retrieving, analyzing, projecting, and producing dynamic scenarios for different plans.

One of the most critical planning functions will be to re-activate the workforce. After determining shortfalls, we should formulate a “virtual workforce restoration” plan that considers advertising, reviewing and selecting candidates, issuing conditional-start contracts, identifying and performing onboarding functions for pay, benefits, training, and acclimation.

A cloud-based suite of HR tools, like ClayHR not only has the integrated functions to help with this process, but it also has a variety of artificial intelligence modules that significantly help with projections and forecasting.

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The ClayHR suite allows HR users to remotely operate a hiring process that is complete with position definition, advertising, resume capture and organization, review process management, and selection.

Image Source: Conceptdraw

Tasks for completing the hiring process can be clearly defined with alarms that track each candidate and reviewer’s progress against the planning schedule.

The system not only allows decision-makers and reviewers to collaborate from remote locations to determine requirements. Once jobs have been publicized, the resulting resumes can be reviewed under a task assignment, monitoring, and completion process that guarantees each selection follows corporate policies and prevailing laws.

While this process allows managers to begin the selection and onboarding process while still under Covid-19 restrictions, it’s main value is in the completeness and consideration given to the new employees as they are guided through the variety of employee onboarding steps needed to bring them to full readiness on the job. Instead of a distant feeling process, where everything is impersonal, the ClayHR process gives new hires the feeling of belonging from the very start of their contact with the organization.

Personalized communications (including video conferencing) and guidance allow each step in the process to be consistent with the individual’s needs. Personal information can be securely uploaded with simple “drag and drop” actions. Both HR personnel and new hires can mutually coordinate the articulation of pay and benefits, organizational policies, training requirements, skill assessments, and even potential task assignments.

When the organization is ready to resume operations and the new hires are ready to go to work, they will have been fully prepared, not just with the technical aspects of onboarding, but they will already be familiar with the cultural personality of the organization and its workforce.
There is not much in management that is more important than bringing on board the right people at the right time with a full indoctrination to the organization. Covid-19 makes this a challenge, but ClayHR is up to the task.

RELATED ARTICLE: A GUIDE FOR HR MANAGERS DURING THE COVID-19-PANDEMIC

P.C Image by Francesco Bovolin from Pixabay

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