This post isn’t to offer counsel on the things that really matter right now. Our work in hiring for leaders within the HR profession around the world is inconsequential when faced with the current developments in health, mortality, economy, society and community.

Instead, this is simply our reassurance that whilst Covid-19 is presenting challenges to you, your team and your company; there is actually a commonality to the challenges being experienced across HR teams all over the world. You’re not alone!

As we speak with functional leaders in various countries, we’re hearing these immediate emerging themes:

1. Business pressures that are new to everyone

   How to run a business when you cannot be sure of how many healthy people can and will attend on site? How to ensure employees remain productive when they “self isolate” with an expectation that they’ll work from home? How to secure value from employees who now have to work remotely, but don’t have the means to work from home (because of technology limitations, type of tasks performed, confidentiality restrictions, etc)

   In short, HR teams are needing to accelerate their thinking on remote based work feasibility. and have an immediate opportunity to keep businesses operating and financially viable

2. Different priorities for the function

   Border closures, travel restrictions, ensuring the health & well being of employees and their extended families, and supporting the requirements of “self isolation” for impacted employees, all makes the building of a HR scorecard pale into insignificance….

3. Remote workers

   We’re repeatedly hearing of folks who, suddenly instructed to work from home after years of attending offices, are thinking they have a new freedom for sleeping in, long lunches, weekday movies, extra family time, etc.  HR teams are needing to pay attention to employee communications on health, and on performance expectations. HR teams are also being relied on for the provision of tools and support frameworks to ensure employees can be effective in working from home eg: how to manage household interruptions, to ensure surroundings allow effective working from home, to avoid feeling isolated, and how to communicate effectively with colleagues and stakeholders on a remote basis

4. Leadership capability

   We all know “bosses” who have a firmly rooted belief that all workers should be physically present onsite, at work.  But with swathes of employees now forced into a remote work arrangement, HR teams are needing to target those managers with immediate coaching and support on how to extend trust and deliverable objectives, whilst avoiding interruptions to productivity, delivery quality, and a sense of team because of misguided micro management

   
   

In our own team discussions, we’re wondering if Covid-19 will be the catalyst that fundamentally changes how and where and when people work. With the fast-tracking of cloud based technology to allow remote working, increased attention on VC technology to allow enhanced remote communications, and the potential cost savings in reducing office based employees; will any affected workplace ever return to the same patterns of previous years?

Is this also an opportunity for companies to identify the types of jobs that no longer need to be done at all; and/or to assess the types of tasks that don’t need to be done on a company site, or that can simply be out-sourced? 

Is this going to be the impetus on career and quality-of-life changes, for people who no longer wish to commute or be office based in order to earn a living?

Certainly, for HR experts who understand the implications of remote working, who have direct experience in transitioning companies to flex and remote work arrangements, who are thought leaders on future of work; sharing this knowledge right now is an opportunity to make a very real difference to companies, and potentially to lives.