Covid-19: And How It’s Changing The Way Companies Operate
As global economies and companies find ways to cope through these unprecedented challenges caused by the novel Coronavirus, what every business leader should always keep in mind is that the health and safety of every teammate, partner, customer, prospect has to remain a top priority, throughout!
While several people are trying to maintain a positive disposition by relying on the ‘’this too shall pass,’’ sentiment, during this moment of crisis, there have been incredible transformations to how companies and teams have tried to ensure business continuity while connecting with others (their employees, customers and prospects).
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Here are some major shifts in company cultures worldwide, some of which might turn permanent or long-term keeping in mind that the threat from the ongoing pandemic may continue, given that there is still no vaccine for it.
More Collaboration with Other HR Leaders
HR leaders, CHROs in global tech companies can benefit a lot through more collaboration with fellow peers and industry leaders. No one was prepared for the pandemic and as a result, it has been observed that every company has found their own ways to cope through the crisis – HR leaders can actually benefit by taking a tip or two from what their counterparts in the industry are doing and not doing, with the aim of ensuring a better and more wholesome human resource infrastructure as teams adjust to the new normal where work from home becomes part of their routine work process.
Ensuring Safety, Above All Else – With High End Sanitization
At some point as a certain percentage of the workforce starts returning to their offices, ensuring a rigorous cleaning policy will be crucial to protecting the overall health and safety of employees and even visiting vendors, partners and customers as the case may be. We’ve all been taught enough on how hand washing and sanitized surfaces are the biggest need of the hour and as professionals across industries resume work in offices, this will have to become a more stringent everyday administrative task.
When the workforce, or when a certain percentage of the workforce does return to the office culture, it will help to:
- Put up Coronavirus related factsheets
- Install/Keep the right facilities in place to ensure better and more frequent handwashing and sanitization
- Ensure deeper sanitization of keyboards and workstations, more than once a day
- Maintain restricted access to areas within the office, allow only few team members at a time in specific places
- Ensure facemasks and gloves are provided regularly, to ensure overall team safety
- Restrict sharing of any equipment, be it pens, notebooks and definitely no water bottles
- Ensure zero handshakes!
- During meetings, ensure everyone is at a safe distance from each other
- Keeping a medical practitioner is available (or ensuring one is accessible via a quick phone call) will also help
- A physical screening prior entry into the office will also become part of the norm, just to double check that no employee has symptoms of the Covid-19 disease.
- A non contact temperature screening tool will therefore feature in every entry area!
The Need to Enhance and Improve Work from Home Infrastructures
Given that there is still no vaccine for the Covid-19 disease, overall health and safety relies on ensuring social distancing practices and better hygiene standards as a form of protection. This also means that a relapse or the need to work from home will continue for a long time coming. Improving remote work capabilities for all staff will help ensure better business continuity, HR leaders or business owners of companies can enable this by offering a certain sum or equipment support to help employees and staff have better bandwidth and connectivity as a starting point.
Read More: Can Business Leaders and Business Owners Avoid Laying Off Employees?
An Enhanced Focus on Operational Efficiencies
While HR leaders and entire teams, especially globally distributed teams have found a way to adjust to this new normal over the last few weeks, there could be challenges when it comes to overall operations. Given that this new work from home model might continue or be an alternating theme for a while longer, it is crucial for companies to also balance their operational effectiveness, ensuring that finance is in line with the needs of other teams, ensuring that salestech, martech, HR Tech tools are easily accessible and important business data is stored in a secure manner. Stronger collaboration between multiple teams will help a more streamlined everyday functioning of the business.
Staying Updated on the Latest (Local) Legislative Directives
Local regulations and lockdown norms are going to change depending on the intensity and spread of the Covid-19 disease in every region, what directives apply to one region won’t to the other. While it is crucial for HR leaders, CHROs and others to stay updated on the latest directives at least in places where they have remote teams and employees, it is just as crucial for business heads and business owners to pay attention to the changing rules and laws of the moment. An HR department can go a step further by constantly communicating these updates to their team members, at least in situations where the team strength is large (over 200) and where the team is largely globally distributed. Adding a note or two that helps boost employee motivation in this communique will help!
The Rising Importance of Involving your Customer and Telling Them What’s Going On!
It’s not a bad idea at this time for businesses to communicate more with their existing customer base with regular updates on what the team is doing or has been doing to ensure business continuity, productivity and seamless customer service. Most large sized tech companies have adopted to doing this. This will also make customers feel like they are part of the family! At the same time, finding out what specific challenges a customer is facing while doing this is a great way to deepen the business relationship.
Reduce Visits of External/Other People
Once offices do resume, with certain percentage of their staff, if not all, reduced visits by partners, vendors will have to be part of the daily norm. What could have been a physical meeting may now need to be a Skype or Zoom online meeting even while at the office!
The Need to Ensure Everyone Has Easy Access To Video / Audio Communication Tools
At a time such as the present where online meetings are the new normal, (though in the global tech sector, this was already a norm since quite sometime) – it is crucial for managers and business owners, even HR heads to ensure that their employees have the right access to video communication and audio communication tools – to streamline meeting goals and professional needs. At the initial stages of the Coronavirus pandemic, several global teams struggled with low bandwidth or difficulty accessing their Zoom/Skype accounts for group meetings. Ensuring that everyone across the hierarchy knows how to use and manoeuvre these tools will boost productivity and reduce waste of resources (and more importantly, time!). A fair knowledge and training when it comes to use of other tools like FaceTime, Microsoft Teams, Group Text Messages will help.
Aiding and Being of Support to the Community
Wherever possible, successful teams and businesses will (and should) focus on helping the community during this challenging time. Distributing medical supplies is a good start for instance. There have been companies who have donated essentials like groceries to frontline staff while others have tried to contribute with sponsorships.