Covid 19, How Work From Home Changing The World Of Human Resources

Introduction

Work from home (WFH) is widely applied in western countries to support work-life balance in the organization. This is designed for employees for more flexibility and balance their job roles in work and outside of work. Implementing this policy WFH arrangement, identified a positive impact on employee work behavior and attitude. (Afrianty, Artatanaya and Burgess, 2021)

The outbreak of COVID-19 changed the way people live and work. WFH implemented globally those sectors where services can deliver online. This has been done due to reducing the spread of Covid 19 that employees are less exposed to the public and reduce workplace involves. HR Department had to take responsibility for providing support for the implementation and supervision.

Advantages Of WFH

Flexibility and agility

home working allows more flexibility in working preparations. because employees are no longer attached to an office, employees feel free and more willing to work flexible working hours such as earlier or later in the day or even at weekends, (A, B. 2021).

Improved employee retention

WFH will help them to need children's needs and decrease their commute and allow them to fit their work with their personal life. This will feel increased trust in their employer.

Attract new talent

Offering WFH to the job market gives an advantage to the employers with their competitors to find new talent who are not offering WFH options to their staff or can find new talents.

Increased productivity

Employees will work long hours and sometimes save their time from starting work early or later. As well as due to fever disturbances which are normally an office environment, WFH allows a quieter environment and more focus on work.

Improved staff health and well-being

Sometimes going to work will be stressful. Additional sleep, spending more time with family, exercising, or preparing healthier meals which will get because of extra time saved from traveling will help staff health benefits. working in isolation there is less chance of infections spreading as would be the case within an office environment and fewer sickness absences.

Technology makes it easier

the internet has made it possible for staff to be continually connected to the office. Zoom, Skype, MS Teams made communication with colleagues and teams easier at any time. (Richa Bandil, 2021)

Disadvantages Of WFH

Working from home doesn't suit everyone

Some employees are not preferring to work from home. They are very much likely to interact with their colleagues and face to face guidance with managers. They feel supervisor guidance face to face will help to complete their task and achieve organization goals. Some employees don’t have a suitable area to do the work and as well as get interruption due to having young children and not being able to do their work during working hours. Most of the time staff feel isolated.

Difficulty monitoring performance

There will be very much difficult to manage the employees' work from home and monitor performance. “Different personalities may also respond to monitoring with varying degrees of positivity. You could look at setting goals and targets with workers that are easily measured so that if their targets aren't being met you can identify and remedy any performance issues at an early stage” (Richa Bandil, 2021)

Cost of working from home

There will be an initial cost for providing equipment such as laptops or desktops to set up at home, mobile phone, internet connection. And employees have to bear costs such as electricity and A/C costs.

Decreased staff morale

Team morale will go down and some work needs to be achieved as a team when people are working on their flexible times there will be conflict in each other to get the work done at given declines. Because of that maintaining team spirit will be harder.

WFH Influenced the role of HR

Employee Engagement

With the advent of remote work, employee involvement has been a challenge for HR professionals. According to Gallup, high levels of workplace engagement often lead to higher performance ultimately driving an aligned, and purpose-driven culture among employees of a company. (Pacific Oaks College, 2021). when Employees are away from office-centered work they feel disconnected from the company. So HR had to take steps to provide virtual engagement to the link between them and implement strategies to support.

Communication

The HR department must maintain communication with workers because most of the employees are not adapt to this work environment like some company's open-door policies and free following communication. Rather than company updates HR needs to monitor and how dealing with the new remote work situation and need to monitor employees are satisfied and productive.

Job Performance

HR departments need to build suitable criteria to measure employee job performance practically. With remote work, staff’ activities are less directly noticeable by the managers and HR. Therefore, successes or failures from employees could be easily missed on a day-to-day basis.

Conclusion

COVID-19 has affected the lives of many people. To prevent the future spread of this pandemic, HR has had to change its traditional paths of working. WFH has brought some convenience, but as the impact of the pandemic has increased, it has also had certain effects on organizations, employees, and HR.  COVID-19 crisis, when employees are working from home, our managers, especially HR practitioners, needed to deal with the issues, such as job skills improvement, employee stress under the crisis, work-family imbalance, and corporate culture reinforcement. Even though the negative and positive impact of work from home hr have to deal with it to get the best from their employees for the success of the organization.

Reference

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