The COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a global health crisis of our time impacting severely our day to day life. With the industry growth rates projected to be the lowest in many years/decades, Business Continuity from a workforce management perspective will take precedence and HR teams will be required to track, measure, and pre-empt what can go wrong in the employee space to minimize the impact on the business.
The voice of most organizations in the current situation can be stated as follows:
“In the New Normal, our ways of working will be more agile, more liquid, and more flexible. We will have a completely new lens to look at Talent, Roles, Performance Measures, governance models, and work policies differently.”
For managing the new normal and for providing a successful Crisis Response Strategy, HR is expected to track a variety of information beyond what was being tracked in the earlier normal. There are 4 broad areas where additional HR metrics are being demanded/evaluated to manage the crisis differently in New Normal:
Managing Employee Cost
Employee Availability
Employee Communication and well being
Redeployment / Rationalization / Reskilling Opportunities
Now let’s look into them one by one…
Managing Employee Cost
Companies are looking at every avenue to minimize cost and since a significant portion of the operational cost is the employee cost, there is a disproportionate focus getting assigned on managing employee cost.
Key metrics – Employee Cost Management
Fixed Cost vs Variable employee cost Models
Production Variability and Part-time employee cost variability
Wage Bill to revenue Ratios, relation to revenue, Productivity Trend and Wage Bill
Leave Provisions, leave projections -Leave balance, leave usage, carry forward provisions
Gratuity provisions – Impact of attrition, superannuation
Superannuation Trend and employees in that age bracket, VRS Options
Attrition prediction and simulations on cost, Manning rates
Span of Control and avenues of rationalization, Org structure redesign
Recruitment – New Hire cost / Replacement hire cost
In year cost, annualized cost, savings if we defer by 1,2 3 Quarters
Modelling the future workforce needs
Zero base look of the structure
Span of control
Compensation & Benefits
With a tighter control on a budget how we utilize the limited kitty in the best way to ring-fence critical talent and ensure a motivated team to deliver in tough situations
Increment & Correction Kitty, Shall we run the
Increment/corrections cycle, not run
Bonus kitty utilization, Shall we pay bonus, if yes at what rate, shall we Defer
Promotion, Shall we run the cycle, not run, what is the cost impact
Critical Roles Safety net, Kitty utilization for critical roles
LTIP and STIP pay-outs, delay / defer decisions
Health insurance benefits across levels
Sales Incentives projections
Employee Availability
The availability of employees will be a bigger challenge across the industry in the times to come. The safety concern is playing big in the minds of people because of the following:
For safety concerns, the employee willingly not turning up for work
Higher the willingness of employees to continue work from home
Employees infected or quarantined
Migration of labor from cities to rural areas
This will help us track the infection trend to the prevailing trend in the relevant geographical area. If the area is seeing an acceleration of cases, you should anticipate similar risks for your workforce.
Key Metrics
Office opening Status – red, orange, green zone, open, closed, % of the workforce allowed
Remote working
% of Employees working from home or their normal location?
What % of our workforce can be switched to work remotely if needed?
What is the Infrastructure cost required for setting up the home office?
Containment zones
Containment Zone wise employee details, and the movement of zones
Zone wise CFAs / DCs / Stores details and employee counts
% of People who use public transport / have their vehicles
Age-wise risk profile
Absenteeism & Productivity
Availability of Employee across grades, locations, functional areas
What is the average duration of employees being unavailable due to COVID-19?
What % of our infected workforce has recovered and returned to work?
Productive Capacity %? How much productive capacity have we lost?
Employee Communication and Wellbeing
Many of us are working alone in isolation at home causing stress and trauma to many people. Accordingly, we are seeing an increase in touchpoints and also the frequency of internal communications.
Location-wise plan of communication sessions
Fitness initiatives plans, Investment, Measuring Effectiveness
Pulse Surveys
Redeployment /Rationalization / Reskilling Opportunities
Knowing that COVID is here to stay for a longer time, to ensure business continuity, the availability of “Talent” for key roles is very essential and new normal.
Talent Management
Key Metrics
Critical Role Identification, Critical People Identification
Succession Planning for key roles
Do we have a track on the successors for a critical role,
How soon can they take up the role in case if there is an unavailability of the role holder?
Employee Skill Data
To check if there are any substitutes in case of long absenteeism
Low performers/ non-performers
or voluntary separation rather than termination
Outplacement and Career transitioning
For down-sizing, believe that they should extend all possible help to this set of ‘would be left-out’ employees.
Learning & Development
The talent management will throw light on the areas where talent will be required in the future and what is the skill gap and how can we utilize the reskilling opportunities to develop our people for the future. Technology has been playing a great role during the present crisis. E-learning tools have been helping the learning to study at home.
Newer Business Focus / Skills Areas – courses available on the online platform
Time Spent on LMS for various courses
Course completion % rates
Learner drop-off rates
Job impact
Training ROI
