Human Resource Management & Covid – 19 Crisis

 

What is Covid-19 crisis?

COVID-19 is an unprecedented health crisis that has strongly shaken the whole world, plunging it into great fear and uncertainty. It has heavily impacted economies, societies, employees, and organizations. This crisis has started first in the city of Wuhan (China), which has witnessed in December 2019 the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that has known a fast spread propelling its status to a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, by the World Health Organization.

Given the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, the countries have implemented several non-pharmaceutical measures intended to reduce its spread, such as social distancing. Lockdown measures have been imposed; people were quarantined; schools, universities, nonessential businesses, and non-governmental organizations have been temporarily closed; travels were restricted; flights were canceled; and mass public gathering as well as social events have been prohibited.

The impact of Covid-19 pandemic:

Trying to recover from this economic shock, companies have started reopening (Major & Machin, 2020), in the mid of this ongoing pandemic, under extraordinary rules and a new functioning (e.g., physical distancing in the workplace) that no one can predict when it will end. Therefore, this pandemic has obviously led to the emergence of a complex and challenging environment for managers and human resource management practitioners who needed to find ingenious solutions to sustain their company's business and to help their employees to cope with the challenges of this unprecedented situation.

In this blog, there are very few studies on the impact of COVID-19 on HRM, its challenges, and its potential opportunities for HRM in organizations, whereas managers and HRM practitioners need relevant information that will help them to go through this crisis effectively and efficiently, to be able to support their employees and to sustain their company's business.

Human Resource Management facing COVID-19: Implications and Challenges:

HRM is about how people are employed, managed and developed in organizations’ (Armstrong & Taylor, 2020). It has been grandly impacted by COVID-19, generating significant challenges for managers and HRM practitioners.

·       Working conditions:

The COVID-19 crisis has drastically altered working conditions in organizations. Indeed, to ensure their business continuity, most organizations have moved to remote working, requiring their employees to work from home. remote working is not suitable for manufacturing industries (Koirala & Acharya, 2020) and it cannot be applied to all job positions (Bartik et al., 2020).

In this context, there were two possible scenarios for companies whose nature of their business does not allow them to adhere to these types of working conditions. Either to require their employees to be physically present while respecting the measures of physical distancing and wearing personal protective equipment or to lay them off.

·       Staffing:

Staffing refers to the process of attracting, selecting, and retaining competent individuals to achieve organizational goals. It had been greatly impacted by COVID-19, which has reshaped its dynamic in organizations.

Organizations that were facing financial difficulties due to this pandemic have adopted down-skilling by cutting back on recruitment of high-skill jobs more than low-skill jobs to reduce their costs and try to sustain their business (Campello, Kankanhalli, & Muthukrishnan, 2020). They have frozen or cut back all their recruitment or they have laid off their employees.

Also, employee retention might represent another major challenge for organizations in the current context of this pandemic (Elsafty & Ragheb, 2020). According to Elsafty and Ragheb 2020, pointed out that during these hard times characterized by drastic and sudden changes, employment relationships might be damaged, leading to the possible dramatic decrease of employees' morale and an increase in turnover.

·       Performance Management:

Performance management is a continuous process of identifying, measuring and developing the performance of individuals and work groups and aligning performance with the strategic goals of the organization (Aguinis, 2019). It is crucial to ensure that employees' performance is aligned with the company's strategic goals (Ismail & Gali, 2017).

To sustain the company amid a crisis like COVID-19, employees are still required to maintain their good performance (Sembiring, Fatihudin, Mochklas, & Holisin, 2020). However, it seems that the COVID-19 outbreak has also altered performance management in organizations. According to some authors, most organizations were overwhelmed by the challenges resulting from COVID-19, such as measuring employees' performance and the disruption in performance-based pay, that they have reduced or even abandoned performance management due to the complexity and the novelty of this pandemic. In fact, measuring employees' performance during this crisis can be challenging, considering the modification of the working conditions.

Bibliography:

Adams-Prassl, A., Boneva, T., Golin, M., & Rauh, C. (2020). Inequality in the impact of the coronavirus shock: Evidence from real time surveys. Journal of Public Economics, 189, 104245.