Introduction
The global crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic has seen rapid changes in all organizations in Australia that required the firms’ Human Resources to respond and mitigate any emerging issues. The pandemic created a sense of confusion and panic, with the Australian government evoking lockdowns and restrictions on movement. Organizations’ employees experienced stress and anxiety caused by health risks caused by crowding in workplaces, others from working from home, and others from losing their jobs due to budget cuts and restrictions to operations of some businesses. This report gives the activities and incentives used by Human Resource Departments during the Covid-19 Pandemic to ensure that employees are operating at their best with minimal to no issues.
Literature Review
Human Resource Management Perspectives
The human resource management in Australia put tactics to help employees deal with uncertainty and ambiguities during the covid-19 pandemic. Human resource management has shown that some individuals are innately better than others at dealing with stress and tension, allowing them to make better judgments and operate more successfully across nations and cultures (Azizi et al., 2021). During this global anxiety and uncertainty, human resource management has prioritized cultural agility characteristics for all workers working in the cultural shifts in all organizations nationally; tolerance for ambiguity, resilience, and curiosity. Cultural agility will help organizations adapt their organizational cultures to the measures, making it easier for staff and other stakeholders to take to the cultural shift.
During the pandemic, there is a lot of ambiguity and confusion, especially among employees. Human resource management has taken measures to provide their employees with a constant flow of information on how the organizations will operate during the pandemic. This has aided in creating structure and understanding inside organizations (Marshall et al., 2021). Professionals who interact with customers, suppliers, or coworkers from other cultures, even digitally, will require these abilities today more than ever. The selection process .has been critical for Companies to utilize this opportunity to examine their bench strengths for culturally adaptable people properly, determining who will be most productive in conditions of increasing novelty and uncertainty (Azizi et al., 2021. Because health-related pressure is evident everywhere globally, human resource management saw the pandemic as a perfect opportunity to create cross-cultural team cohesiveness and confirm reliability standards. Training to help with connection development seems to be well-received when every team member is dealing with a comparable stressor (Marshall et al., 2021). The same stress, anxieties, and frustrations have aided HRM in forging bonds that have strengthened already collegial multinational teams.
In the uncertainty of national-wide work and the present COVID-19 crisis, the issues for which help is required will vary based on the company’s work-life concerns, but human resource management support remains vital. Human resource management approaches included stress-reduction methods such as seminars on resiliency, awareness training, staff support initiatives, and online counseling programs (Marshall et al., 2021). These stress-relieving services have been incredibly beneficial for personnel who work virtually on a national scale, as they confront added tension of disconnection from colleagues.
Meeting HR Requirements
Even with the changes occurring in many organizations in Australia, the role and requirements of the Human Resource department haven’t changed a lot. The provisions of the human resource department generally include hiring the right persons for their organizations, optimizing workforce planning and strategy, tailoring the employees’ experiences as they work for the organizations, helping employees learn and grow, and managing employee performance. With restrictions on movements and crowding, HR has seen it needing assessment and recruiting platforms that would help them connect with aspiring employees.
Human resources are examining their primary skill pools to determine the capabilities necessary for the business and whether they are over or under-resourced in the required expertise. This entailed adopting a more comprehensive and dynamic perspective of their talent pool—one that abandons the customary emphasis with titles and established positions in favor of focusing on the underlying abilities that employees possess (Wunderlich & Løkke, 2020). HR discovered that firms that begin with talents (the skills they require, those they have, and how they balance the woe may vary over time) could loosen up their creativity and develop more innovative methods to deal with the national wide crisis.
Some Human Resource departments created workforce-planning technologies to assist them in matching individuals to jobs. AI-enabled technologies aided in assessing an individual’s talents, and output management systems redesigned to monitor skills alongside performance, mainly when employees work from home. Interoperable learning recordings acted as skills transcripts, tracking employees’ development pre-covid, during covid, and post covid (Buheji. & Buheji, 2020). Employee experience and connection have taken on entirely new connotations as firms have been more attentive about employee experience due to expanded work-from-home policy. Because of the blurring of the barrier between life and work, employee experience is even more critical while operating remotely. HR teams dealing with the employee experience in a remote workplace were to personalize the strategy to people segmentation. That meant that HR established a hybrid workplace where employees would work in group shifts, work in the office on certain days, and at home on others. This relieved the daily commuting routine and maintained a balance of not being imprisoned by work even in their homes.
Developing Effective Human Resources
HRM has had to expand its attention on racial and socioeconomic disparities during the pandemic period to increase its efficiency in providing service. HR personnel talked to workers about their feelings and created programs to assist detect and eradicating prejudice. HR must take responsibility for where employees work and how they work, mainly when workers work at home (Dirani et al., 2020). This involves instructing them on how to reduce distractions and perform more efficiently. It might also entail advising personnel on setting limits so they don’t overwork themselves, which can lead to mental and physical difficulties. These types of problems are awful for the employee, but they may also have legal repercussions for the company. Furthermore, HR has had to maintain ever-changing health recommendations and regulations (Elsafty, & Ragheb, 2020). Human resource specialists had to swiftly understand how to observe and apply government authorities’ recommendations on sanitization and social distance throughout the pandemic.
HR is an essential player in determining how workers can perform effectively in their pandemic workplace, whether onsite, hybrid or entirely remote. This necessitates flexibility, adaptation, and inventiveness on the part of HR experts. Efficient HR teams were critical in recognizing what worked successfully throughout the crisis and expanding on it to gain a competitive edge (Dirani et al., 2020). When the corporation developed satellite offices to permit social distance and organized work, HR had to determine how hubs would cooperate with headquarters. It was on to HR to critically analyze how the firm wanted to function throughout the epidemic, both culturally and technically. After identifying the organization’s needs, HR would devise measures and methods to be used on employees to guarantee they can deal with any changes made by the firm (Elsafty, & Ragheb, 2020). HR leaders will have to begin to collaborate with workers at all levels more and use collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is the power of various teams’ collaboration, efforts, and participation. With all that HR executives have on their hands during the epidemic, they will fail if they do not trust their workers to explore ideas for home work arrangements, continuing participation, and engagement. It was critical for Australian HR personnel to be able to adjust collective intelligence to be efficient.
Total Rewards
Almost all workers are experiencing more significant stress as a result of the coronavirus. Some are placing themselves in danger to keep activities going on-site, while others have gotten or will get sick. Despite limited resources, most total rewards HR leaders have upgraded at least one award to assist staff during this challenging period (Jaškevičiūtė, Stankevičienė, Diskienė, & Savickė, 2021). The awards were centered on two strategies: a whole-person perspective to staff well-being that includes biological, psychological, social, monetary, and emotional components of wellness, and an agile total rewards strategy and procedure that allows HR to adjust to changes quickly in stormy times.
Using a Whole-Person Perspective to Improving Staff Well-Being by Focusing Past Physical Wellness and Effectively Incorporating All Aspects of Well-Being into Reward Programs, HR created packages to assist staff in maintaining their physical health throughout the COVID-19 epidemic. However, employees’ psychological, emotional, and economic wellness were critical, and HR could not afford to ignore them (Elsafty, & Ragheb, 2020). Australian HR specialists may engage financial consultants to regularly answer staff issues via webinars and individual consultations to assist personnel in relieving monetary stress (Buheji. & Buheji, 2020). Regarding psychological and emotional well-being, HR is educating or coordinating trainers to help managers’ spot indicators of mental illness or emotional distress and get acquainted with coping tools such as staff support programs. Furthermore, HR introduced workplace mental health programs, allowing employees to seek rapid treatment from specialists on a care package.
A Nimble Total Rewards Strategy was developed to adapt to a changing environment by making incentive schemes more flexible to prepare for future uncertainties (Buheji. & Buheji, 2020). One Australian HR team assisted in developing a minimum sales commission protection plan for the entire year to retain a robust sales force and motivation amid the crisis. Furthermore, HR professionals increased their use of nonmonetary incentives to reward employees and promote corporate performance. This was done by emphasizing staff training and development activities such as extension assignments, job mirroring, volunteering initiatives, and management duties in organization-wide, department-led, and manager-employee interactions.
Building Effective Employee-employer Relationships
It is critical, to begin with, an awareness of your workers’ backgrounds. Assessments focused groups, and one-on-one talks with workers may be used nationally by HR teams to measure this. Once they obtained this knowledge, they shared it with the managers of their organization and helped develop initiatives to improve relationships in the organizations (Aldoghan, 2021). One of the most challenging circumstances for HR is the necessity to lay off staff to keep the firm running. During the pandemic, there were significant layoffs, which were primarily handed to employees via HR. HR professionals approached workers as soon as they suspected rumors or inquiries about layoffs were spreading, and they answered honestly if personnel cutbacks were probable (Wunderlich & Løkke, 2020). Another important determinant of employee relations during a corporate downturn is how HR treats staff during the leaving process. HR departments in Australia devised strategies to assist workers in making a move, and offering outplacement services assisted employees in moving on with their life more comfortably.
There are several tools available to assist with the employer-employee relationships during this challenging period and afterward. The Employee Engagement Poll (EES) is an internet survey aimed to discover latent organizational discontent (Wunderlich, & Løkke, 2020). Using the online survey, HR assisted in preparing the atmosphere for drafting an intervention plan to address any difficulties that arise during workplace relationships.
Conclusion
The Human Resource department played a critical role in how employees received, adapted to, and normalized the changes during the pandemic. The HR specialist was tasked with ensuring that employees coped well with the new normal and Followed the set health guidelines. The HR made efforts towards ensuring the physical and psychological well-being of employees. The covid 19 pandemic brought changes to how the HR management engages employees to ensure the well-being of the staff.
References
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Marshall, A. P., Austin, D. E., Chamberlain, D., Lee-anne, S. C., Cree, M., Fetterplace, K., … & Williams, L. (2021). A critical care pandemic staffing framework in Australia. Australian Critical Care, 34(2), 123-131.
Wunderlich, M. F., & Løkke, A. K. (2020). Human Resource Management Practices in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Denmark: AARHUS University.
Buheji, M., & Buheji, A. (2020). Planning competency in the new Normal–employability competency in post-COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Human Resource Studies, 10(2), 237-251.
Dirani, K. M., Abadi, M., Alizadeh, A., Barhate, B., Garza, R. C., Gunasekara, N., … & Majzun, Z. (2020). Leadership competencies and the essential role of human resource development in times of crisis: a response to Covid-19 pandemic. Human Resource Development International, 23(4), 380-394.
Elsafty, A. S., & Ragheb, M. (2020). The role of human resource management towards employees retention during Covid-19 pandemic in medical supplies sector-Egypt. Business and Management Studies, 6(2), 5059-5059.
Aldoghan, M. (2021). TO EXAMINE THE MEDIATING IMPACT OF WORK ENGAGEMENT AMONG THE RELATIONSHIP OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND SERVICE RECOVERY PERFORMANCE DURING PANDEMIC-19. International Journal of eBusiness and eGovernment Studies, 13(1), 23-49.
Jaškevičiūtė, V., Stankevičienė, A., Diskienė, D., & Savickė, J. (2021). The relationship between employee well-being and organizational trust in the context of sustainable human resource management. Problems and perspectives in management, 19(2), 118-131.
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