Human resource strategies in a post-COVID era - remote working models and implications

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world in 2020 and brought it to a standstill. With the virus spreading at an alarm rate, along with several other safety measures, immediate lock down was announced by many countries around the world. India is also one of the worst hit nations and imposed a strict lock down. Due to this several business and industries have adopted virtual mode of working to keep their business running. The pandemic has severely disrupted the workplace of yesterday and firms across sectors have been scrambling to plan and implement new HR strategies to enable smooth day-to-day operations, employee engagement amidst the numerous obstacles to normal functioning. We students at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Post Graduate Program were very keen on understanding how various organizations have adopted to this new norm and their shift in various HR strategies. Hence, we took up this project through which we have tried to understand various remote working models across sectors and analyze them. For this, we interviewed multiple HR personnel across organizations along with Employees of various organizations. We were able to understand few key initiatives undertaken by the organizations and their future thought process about shifts of working models going forward in future. As an outcome of the project, we have proposed comprehensive learnings on various initiatives, shift in HR strategies across the sectors. We have segregated them under various buckets like employee morale, outlook etc. We were able to analyze and suggest few recommendations on what we feel will be the new trend going forward in future regarding HR strategies and working models.