The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is too prominent on economics, health, and the market. We can say that this unfolding impact story is getting complicated each day and it is also fluid in its ever-changing dimension. According to market experts, one of the most significant impacts of this deadly virus has been on organizations and their nature regardless of type and size. This virus has been spreading invisibly and rapidly and as a result, more and more countries are activating lockdowns. In such a situation organizations do not have any other solution instead comply with the restrictions provided by the government. But still, owners are making their organizations operational in all ways. You know that remote work or the work from home style has become the instant solution to ensure the continuity of these organizations. In order to adjust to this sudden but strong shift, HRM practices are also getting redesigned in order to support new workforce and growth requirements.
When it comes to changing or redesigning HRM practices, organizations are suggested to consider agility, creativity, and flexibility. These attributes are true requirements of any organization that wants to survive as well as grow amid the continuous threatening of the coronavirus. Now your employees have started to log in virtually or remotely. And that’s why you need to turn your brick-and-mortar type office setting into a virtual workplace almost overnight. The change is quick and most organizations are not getting sufficient time to adjust with every unknown wave.
HRs are getting effective guidelines in order to improve the HRM practices so that all employees can manage work from home process seamlessly as well as securely. Some organizations have also supported employees with the required digital infrastructure such as laptops, data cards, etc. Organizations have arranged all these things just to ensure business continuity even during the pandemic.
Now we can explore the before and during COVID pictures of the HRM practices to better understand how the pandemic is changing HRM practices in nearly all organizations.
HRM practices before and during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Recruitment- Before HRs used to prepare job advertisement drafts manually and publish that into various job advertisement portals. Some organizations still post job advertisements in newspapers and magazines and so on. After that. Candidate shortlisting was also done by manual efforts. HRs used to conduct various rounds of face-to-face interviews in order to select the most eligible candidate for the organization. But all these practices are now changing forever.
In order to deal with the virus, keep running the organization, and make all recruitment-related HRM best practices future-proof, HRs are following new ways of recruitment. Now they are taking the help of cloud-based software solutions to prepare and post job advertisements and shortlisting eligible candidates. When it comes to face-to-face interviews, they are making use of various types of free and paid video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, and so on. In order to stop the chain of virus spread, maintain a safe distance, and obey government restrictions, HRs are taking the entire recruitment procedure online.
- Onboarding- This is the first step or process to introduce a newly hired employee to the company. This process is critical. Here, a single mistake can create negative images of the company. And that’s why HRs take this procedure too seriously. When employees used to visit the office physically. HRs used to plan various activities and onboarding programs so that new people feel comfortable as well as delighted to join the company. But now there is no such chance of doing the same.
Now newly hired employees are joining the organization from their home. For successful onboarding, HRs are planning different things such as video conferencing to meet the team and other activities to let the employees know more about the organization, most importantly HRs are finding it is effective to equip newly hired employees with an ESS portal. In this way, employees can upload the required documents, bank details, and other information to the new organizational system and explore more about the organization. It creates a sense of transparency and newly hired ones feel more comfortable starting serving the new organization. Attendance management- we can see a lot of changes when it comes to attendance-related HRM practices. HRs are completely following new ways to manage employee attendance and streamline all organizational factors well. Some companies used to maintain manual paper-based registers in order to manage employee attendance. Apart from this, a lot of companies also used to install biometric systems in order to keep employees’ in and out time in real-time. But all these processes are not outdated due to the pandemic. From daily attendance to attendance record maintenance- everything is now going to be handled by cloud-based hr management software solutions with attendance management features.
Generally, your employees will not require any additional software or hardware in order to access any SaaS solution for attendance. They can access it by using any browser. In the same way, HR will be able to manage all records and other attendance management tasks via the single SaaS solution.
- Leave management- this is another vital aspect of any organization. And it becomes truly critical when it comes to keeping the productivity level up and approving leaves to many employees at the same time. Before the pandemic, HRs often try to carry the manual approach. They used to maintain leave spreadsheets and carry the approval process via emails. Such a process is prone to creating multiple confusions. But employees used to visit the office and they were able to resolve confusions by communicating directly.
But during the pandemic, this procedure is not looking worthy to continue for a longer span of time. And that’s why they are equipping the leave management HRM practices with real-time hr management software solutions with next-gen leave management features. In this way, employees can easily apply for leaves and it will be directly sent for approval to the responsible persons such as HRs and the owner. Here. HRs will get a quick leave calendar to make quick leave approval decisions. In this way, the production level will be at the desired level and employees will also get leaves whenever they require based on the terms and policy of the organization.
- Payroll management- Probably this is the most important as well as serious HRM practice that requires a lot of expertise and sincerity. You know that just a single mistake in the payroll management procedure can drag an organization to the court, ruin the reputation, and create huge employee dissatisfaction. In order to avoid all these changes and to improve the payroll management related HRM practices, HRs and organization owners are taking the help of cloud-based technologies such as HRMWARE. Attendance details to leave details- everything will be recorded in real-time. There is no need to calculate the salary of each employee at every month-end and prepare lots of payslips. Such a cloud-based software solution will manage every payroll task automatically with zero to little manual effort.
The entire process will be fast, automatic, and there will be no human error. In order to keep the payroll practice error-free and transparent. Companies are tending to cloud-based Hr software solutions with amazing payroll management features before and during the pandemic.
- Cost-effective HRM practices- There is no point in spending a lot of money just over the human resource management practices especially when the market is facing several crises due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Enabling different software solutions for various HRM aspects or continuing with the manual HRM practices are expensive. These practices often bring serious problems and to fix that companies need to spend lots of money. Today’s smart organization owners are not willing to continue with such old-school HRM practices. And we can see that even before the pandemic a lot of organizations started enabling cloud-based versatile HR management software solutions to strengthen their human resource management department.
Continuing paper-based and related manual HRM practices are not only expensive but also prone to error. In order to keep everything completely flawless, more and more organizations are tending to cloud-based hr management software solutions.
- More secure cloud-based HRM practices- If the HRM system is not secure enough, any kind of problem can take place at any time. Paper-based files and cabinets are not secure enough. On other hand, no one can access these files remotely. Data theft, data manipulation, data loss, or any other problem can take place at any time. In order to ensure high security or organizational and employee data along with easy remote access, enabling cloud-based HR management systems has become one of the most popular HRM practices. Even before the pandemic, some companies were trying to make a global workforce and they were investing more in remote technologies.
Hr management software systems that come with cloud storage offer amazing data security. You may know that HR databases have become the soft targets of many cyber attackers as they get a lot of information about people here. From the address of individuals to bank details- an HR database contains a lot of information. And that’s why it needs to be protected well. When it comes to organizational data security, before and during the pandemic, HRs and the organization owners started to depend on cloud-based hr management systems. Here, data file upload and access are easy but super secure. Only allowed users with the right user id will be able to login to the system and do the needful. It is much safer than software systems that make you flip between various files or paper-based manual styles.
- Automatic performance management- carrying out the annual appraisal and performance management has become easier than anything with the help of advanced hr management software solutions. Such software solutions have simply changed the HRM practices we used to follow in order to commit proper performance and appraisal management. When companies used to conduct everything manually with pen and paper, carrying out performance evaluation once a year was possible. Companies were not equipped enough to do it several times in a year. And as a result, they were not getting the desired organizational performance.
A well-rounded and advanced performance management system will only focus on arranging objective and relevant feedback from various sources. It will help in the easy identification of true performers of an organization along with employees who require more guidance as well as training. In a simpler tone, we can say that old-school HRM practices used to include performance evaluation just once a year where modern HRM practices are prioritizing it more and conducting several times of performance evaluation around the year.
- Paper-less HRM practices- according to experts, paper-less HR practices can benefit an organization in several ways. You can see that it is simply freeing the HR teams from the burden of filling various paper forms, updating spreadsheets, and filing paper documents. The cloud-based hr management system simply replaces these tasks with automated processes and soft-copy files. Everything will be recorded and performed in real-time so that HRs can get more time to carry out more important activities that contribute more value to business success.
Paper-less HRM practices also help in having fewer errors and make the organization enjoy a higher degree of accuracy. Apart from this, documents are going to be saved digitally and they will be easy to find, access, and update remotely.
These are HRM best practices that have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We must say these HRM practices are improved and better than their older counterparts. If your organization is yet to upgrade the HRM practices, you should do it now. The market has become unpredictable due to the threat of a pandemic. In order to improve the practices, you must require an HR management system like HRMWARE with stunning cloud benefits. Small to giant- any type of organization can enable this solution and enjoy smooth and improved HRM practices.