The Impact of Covid-19 Pandemic On Functional Human Resources

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted and continue to impact HR functional areas of recruiting, staffing, employee compensation, employee and labor relations, human resources compliance, organizational structure, employee training and development. It literally shut everything down in March 2020. It is redefining work, workers, and the workplace. It has forced organizations to reevaluate and question everything about operational efficiencies. It has made some workers question whether they should even be part of the workforce.

Practical Human Resources Implications of the Pandemic on Employees and Organizations

A SHRM article published on April 22, 2020,( https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/hr-managers-rethink-their-work-coronavirus-pandemic.aspx) studied how Activision Blizzard (AB) (now embroiled in allegations of sex discrimination and hostile workplace) dealt with the pandemic by adopting policies and practices to address employee health, well-being, and prompt access to medical care. AB put procedures in place to manage the furloughed and laid-off employees, and quickly moved 99% of their workforce to remote work temporarily with plans that some may be permanent. AB effectuated changes to provide flexibility to policies they never dealt with before, especially where some of the employees as parents were also juggling being their children’s teachers, coaches, doctors, house cleaners, cooks, and welfare managers all at once.

Organizations in this era must learn and adapt to stresses that employees were not used to before. That requires changing hiring practices including required competencies and qualifications and provide resources to their managers to learn and adapt to a dynamic environment. It is doubtful that any organization’s remote work policies could have anticipated such scope of change. Applying the usual telecommuting policies did not and cannot cut it. Flexibility and creativity are required as workers overwhelmingly support permanence in some aspects of remote work (“Pulse of the American Worker Survey: It This Working?” by Prudential).

AB demonstrated how HR became so important in a period of turmoil and contraction as lay-offs were more the norm at the beginning of the pandemic. Increasingly, organizations are seeing HR as an asset and a key player in the structure of an organization.

Currently, we are in a period of tight labor market. Proper staffing is being squeezed. Interviews are now routinely done via video applications like zoom, and some managers have never met their direct reports. Training has changed as well. The interpersonal interactions needed to train new employees have been supplanted by sharing screens on video applications. Some new hires report not having a sense of belonging. In an August 16, 2021 HBR article “It’s Time to Re-Onboard Everyone,” we see that high turnovers and the uncertainty of the workplace have left most including senior employees “unmoored.” Some organizations are adopting “virtual watercoolers” to some success. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. This trend is sure to continue as companies like Microsoft and others are indefinitely delaying employees’ return to office as the covid variants surges.

Human Resources Departments As Assets

Hiring practices have seen significant shifts. As we work from all corners of the globe it is no longer necessary, at least for now, that labor be sourced locally. Talent base has expanded for those that can capitalize on it. There are those who were previously in retirement but now find it advantageous to get back into the workforce since they can now work remotely from their dream retirement locations. There are also those that have taken career breaks that are coming back into the work force. For these groups, companies are implementing “returnships” pioneered by Goldman Sachs to ease them back into the work force. Companies are getting wise to the fact that employees will take short or extended career breaks, extended maternity leaves, and will require support when they return to re-launch their careers.

A Hi Bob, Inc. article titled “6 Lessons from COVID-19 that Reinvented the Role of HR” argues that HR and IT have been pivotal to the success of organizations in this environment and makes the point, amongst others, that technology should be capitalized upon to improve employee engagement. Communication becomes even more important as managers must find more creative and effective ways to get the most out of the workforce while ensuring high engagement level.

Certain positive trends are emerging among organizations in programs that they offer to enhance employee well-being that include both physical and mental health. This follows studies that show the toll the pandemic has had on emotional and mental health, social and relational health, financial health, and physical health of the workforce. There is an evolving and welcome sense that we are all in this together.

As the covid virus mutates variants, it is even more important for leaders to be nimble in crafting policies and practices. Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has now been approved for general use and companies are now faced with whether to institute policies regarding vaccination mandates, just as the Federal government is having OSHA involved in vaccine mandates. Leaders must have courage, in the face of incredible divisions within the populace, to institute such mandates while emphasizing the obligations of a global citizenry. Organizations will need to put in place their vaccination and mask-wearing strategies, including eligibility for accommodations.

The National Council on Compensation Insurance has issued many updates on questions like whether COVID-19 is covered under workers compensation, the recording of employee illnesses, employee classifications if an organization has limited operations, classification for the cleaning crews, etc.

The pandemic has also introduced us to the “great resignation.” There are even tips on how to quit during the great resignation. People are looking for time to reflect, find something more convenient for them, or things that they are more passionate about, and they have money and career goals that may no longer align with their current jobs. Some are also dealing with grief, and a prolonged sense of isolation as the immense tragedy of the pandemic continues to take its toll. In the August 20, 2021 article “Three indisputable Truths About The Great Resignation,” the authors make the point that it is not a fad. Remote work has opened a whole new world out there. Organizations must do much more to engage, train, care for and retain their employees. The HR, it will seem, has entered another golden age as envisioned by Peter Cappelli.

The Burden is Uneven Within Our Society

In its third annual Profile of the Legal Profession report, the American Bar Association found that one-third of lawyers 62 or older changed their retirement plans due to the pandemic, more than half worried about pay cuts and three time as many female lawyers took on additional childcare responsibilities.

However, it has not been all gloomy. It is my belief that in some areas of my work, I am more productive. I know some people that used to travel weekly for their work. Those have now been found to be unnecessary. Meetings can be held electronically across multiple continents and time zones. Meetings that used to take hours to drive to now take a great deal less time on zoom or other video conference applications. I find that people tend to just get down to business. The downside is the loss of interpersonal relationships that used to drive businesses in some ways. Also, there is such a thing as zoom overload (https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-all-those-zoom-and-google-meets-are-so-draining-and-what-to-actually-do-about-it/).

In some of the industries I work with, I find that the ones that are agile in their business models and who quickly adapted to online platforms for delivering goods and services excelled. For those in manufacturing work, the pandemic affected supply side in getting raw materials for the manufacture of products. It also exposed the great need for warehousing, shipping and customer service capacities as online sales began to skyrocket.

The most dramatic change for many parents has been managing their children’s home schooling, extra-curricular activities, homework, etc. Work-life balance has never been more important. A lot of us are re-evaluating our priorities. Do I want to be on the tennis court instead of taking that meeting? Do I really like this job that I have now, or should I be doing something else that I find more fulfilling? These are some of the questions I have heard asked. Burnout is real and it will appear that the pandemic has exacerbated it globally (see “How the Pandemic Exacerbated Burnout,” HBR February 10, 2021). Getting ahead of it is critical in minimizing turnover and retaining talent.

It is evident that COVID-19 has affected women more adversely as an unprecedented number of women have left the workforce according to a Alisha Gupta’s New York Time’s article of October 3, 2020 titled “Why did Hundreds of Thousands of Women Drop Out of the Work Force?” Ms. Gupta found that the initial job losses was from female-dominated industries like hospitality, healthcare, education, and entertainment. She also found that women were also beginning to simply opt out especially due to the persistent gender wage gap.

Mothers, and Black women were adversely affected the most as seen in the study by McKinsey & Company titled “Women in the Workplace – 2020.” The study posits that companies “need to address the heightened challenges” that women continue to face in the workforce and must offer better support to women and especially to Black women by investing in and building a more flexible and empathetic workplace. Some of the solutions they proffer include offering parenting and homeschooling resources, changing the performance review processes, mental health counseling, health checks and healthcare services, personal well-being and enrichment programs, emergency loans and or grants, stipends to offset the costs of working from home and job training and re-skilling (McKinsey 15-52)

McKinsey predicts that companies are at risk of losing women leadership for a generation unless certain actions are taken. The study shows that senior-level women are facing heightened pressure at work and home, they are exhausted and burned out. The same is true of women with disabilities. The study offers six key solutions that include, making the pace of work more sustainable, finding creative ways for employees to take a break; taking steps to minimize gender bias, strengthen employee communication and putting policies and practices in place to better support employees (McKinsey 37-44).

The August 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report showed that women only accounted for 11.9% of the job gains with Black women, Asian women, Latinas, and women with disabilities faring even worse. Indeed, an analysis of that jobs report shows that at the current trajectory, it will take women 9 years to regain jobs lost since February 2020. See September 2021 article by Jasmine Tucker of the National Women’s Law Center “Justice for Her. Justice for All.” Female labor force participation has been in an unchecked downward spiral since the pandemic as millions of women were driven out of the workforce.

Are Emerging Trends Sustainable?

The pandemic also ushered in an era of activism. With the social justice movements globally, organizations now look at inclusion and diversity as an asset as opposed to a legal compliance quota to meet. Bloomberg reported in a March 10, 2021, publication titled “Corporate America Goes on a Diversity Officer Hiring Spree” that such hiring has been triple the normal rate and that it has begun to matter who leads the diversity and inclusion advisory practice. In a May 25, 2021 article by Alex Hickey and Morning Brew however, organizations are reported as still scrambling to hire chief diversity officers, although the trend does seem to be heading in the right direction.

Unionization has seen an uptick during the pandemic. We’ve all read of the unsuccessful attempts by Amazon workers to unionize. A January 22, 2021 report by the Economic Policy Institute shows that union workers have fared better than non-union workers during the pandemic. It further found that the erosion of worker power worsened during the pandemic and makes the case for the dismantling of existing barriers to unionization.

There is also greater emphasis on mental health and general well-being of the employee. It is no longer enough to simply check off providing for disability, health insurance coverage and other benefits. Paid leave policies and practices are being re-evaluated and wellness days are being embraced by organizations, although for the most part, gig workers are being excluded from this trend. This needs to change as gig work continues to grow and evolve during the pandemic.

In conclusion, while the pandemic has been devastating to persons and organizations, it has also given us a chance to truly re-invent how we work, what we think of the workplace and how employees are treated. There is also a sense of a greater employee freedom in making choices that are getting embraced by organizations. Human Resources Departments within organizations should be leading this charge.