Pandemic and Human Resource Management

 Pandemic and Human Resource Management

During late 2019 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus -2, known as Covid-19 invade the world which impact billions of people within short period of a time and on 11 March 2011 the World Health organisation declared as a pandemic. Virus induced pandemic not only affected health services but also every other industry as rapid growth of infected people, forced governments through out the world to lock down respective countries.

Millions of workers lost their jobs while majority of the organisations changed their policies and practices to avoid contracting virus. Many companies adopted remote working option to minimise the impact on business while maintaining health and safety guidelines impose by government. Covid-19 is the biggest global health challenge the world faced after more than a decade (Brodeur et al.,2020; Gourinchas,2020).

Once the pandemic got settled down company started resume their temporarily halted operations to recover from the economic crisis (Major and Machin,2020). Even though Human resource management was able to overcome the challenges came with pandemic, Industry experts realised business were not prepared for this type of crisis (Wang, Hutchins, and Garavan, 2009).

In any organisation employees are the backbone and can be consider as competitive advantage in industry. Most of the companies try to retain employees while maintain considerable production output (Bisht, Chaubey & Thapliyal,2016). Covid-19 greatly impacted Human resource management as well as immediate managers.

Main purpose of strategic human resource management is effectively utilising the human resources to achieve strategic goal of the organisation (Chapman, Sisk, Schatten, and Miles, 2018; Navio-Marco, Solorzano-Garcia, and Palencia-Gonzalez, 2019: Schuler, 1992).

Strategic agility is required to ensure that work force achieves corporate goals in a time of crisis (Liu. Lee, and Lee, 2020). Organisation able to be prepare and allocate resources, coordinate required procedure, and utilise the available resources to mitigate the impact.

Working conditions consider the fundamental aspect of work and employment relations (ILO, 2020). Working conditions cover broad range of requirements such as working hours, break periods, and work schedules, remuneration, physical well-being, and mental well-being (ILO, 2020).

Covid-19 crisis made drastic change in organisation working conditions. As a countermeasure of business continuity most organisation moved employees to remote working, requesting employees to work from home (Aitken-Fox et al., 2020a, 2020b; Gourinchas, 2020: Koirala and Acharya, 2020).

Number of employees working from home is just a fraction from whole work force (Gourinchas, 2020), Since most of the working force is not suitable for working from home, mainly employees allocated to manufacturing, hospitality industry (Koirala and Acharya, 2020) and cannot be applied to every job positions.

In such scenarios company had only two possible solutions:

• Requesting employees to be present physically while adhering the health and safety rules implemented by world Health Organisation, providing required medical facilities and protective equipment.

• To lay off employees who cannot perform their tasks remotely. The study conducted by Adams-Prassl, Boneva, Golin, and Rauh(2020) concluded that most of the employees who are unable to conduct remote working would lose their job.

Human resource management persons were urged to identify the job roles which can be perform remotely, positions which can be performed physically and to identify the positions which need to be lay off. These unexpected challenges were present to Human resource management and immediate managers due to pandemic crisis.

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