The Impact of COVID-19 on HR and Tools That Can Help
In discussions about COVID-19’s impact on businesses, the main concern seems to be job security and a company’s ability to stay afloat while complying with government regulations.
After all, unemployment rates in the U.S. skyrocketed at 13% in May. This is quite an increase from that 3.8% reported just three months prior.
But business shutdowns and massive layoffs are just one side of the coin. While we have travel and hospitality industries slowing down, we also have e-commerce, for example, that’s struggling to keep up with exponentially increased demands.
Either way, it’s up to the HR professionals to ensure that all staffing issues are solved and that business continues as normal – at least as normal as possible.
HR is tasked with many essential duties due to COVID-19, so let’s see some of the profession’s major changes and examine tools like HR training software that might make all these changes more comfortable to bear.
Human Resource Management More Important Than Ever
The coronavirus crisis has forced businesses to either adapt or fade away.
Regardless of how a particular company responded to the pandemic, it’s up to HR to ensure that all employees are safe, informed, and ready for all the workplace changes.
It’s HR’s role to guide employees and managers and help them through all the difficulties they may be facing now. See how COVID-19 has impacted the HR staff and the tasks they handle.
Greater Focus on the Hiring/Firing Process
Hopefully, the pandemic disrupted businesses only temporarily. And whether your company’s facing the possibility of layoffs, or it’s in dire need of more staff, it’s crucial to be careful with the hiring/firing process.
Primarily, the HR staff needs to ensure that only as few people as possible are fired.
Not only can massive layoffs be a bad business strategy, but they could ruin a company’s reputation and make it more difficult to find prospective talented employees in the future.
Secondly, if hiring new employees during COVID-19 is necessary, the process needs to be done right if you don’t want to face high turnover rates.
It would be best if you devote time and effort to finding the right talent for the job, getting the onboarding right, and training the new staff well.
A high-quality LMS software can help with all of it. You can use it to develop tests and quizzes to see whether an applicant is a good fit for your company and create a bulletproof onboarding and training plan.
A Need for Better Organization
With lockdowns and social-distancing measures, there’s a need for businesses to have a better organization.
Should you go remote? How can you ensure that every employee can go remote?
You need to develop appropriate schedules, ensure that everyone has the proper equipment to work from home, be considerate to employees with children who can’t go to school/kindergarten.
It’s the HR’s task to develop the best solution that would be appropriate to businesses and their employees.
The Necessity to Nurture Company Culture
With everyone working remotely, it’s much more difficult for employees to get a sense of the company culture and continue working as a team.
Without face-to-face interaction, employees tend to feel more isolated and less loyal. Their productivity can drop, and their performance can go down, affecting the business negatively.
It’s crucial for HR staff to find ways to nurture company culture even while everyone’s self-isolating.
LMS software can be helpful here. You can organize virtual (informal) company get-togethers, participate in online team-building activities, and create a sense of unity among employees.
A Focus on Keeping the Employees Engaged
Without a sense of belonging to the company culture, many employees tend to become disengaged and lose their morale.
Especially now, during the pandemic, they’re worried about their job security, health, and loved ones.
Keeping their morale and engagement levels up becomes even more difficult if their home and current work environment aren’t conducive.
So, it’s up to HR to provide support to all the employees and help them through these difficult times. Not only will it help to promote a healthier company culture, but it will keep your employees more motivated.
Measuring Performance Metrics Became More Critical
Since it’s impossible to physically supervise employees while working from home, it’s essential to develop ways to monitor and measure their performance remotely.
While there are countless tools and software that can help measure key metrics and provide automated reports, this task requires a more human touch during the pandemic.
It’s vital to stay in touch with all employees, react when their performance goes down, and allow them to take a break if they’re working too much. All these tasks become more critical than ever before.
HR Faced With the Need to Handle Employee Micromanagement
Many managers and bosses are guilty of micromanaging their employees, even in typical work environments. But this tends to grow into an even bigger problem when you have a remote workforce.
Micromanaging can hinder employees’ productivity, increase burnout, stifle their creativity, and stress them out.
Not to mention that it can break the trust between employers and employees and cause unnecessary tension.
It’s the HR’s responsibility to prevent micromanagement and ensure that the relationship between managers and employees stays positive and productive.
These are just some of the examples of how the HR’s role has been affected by COVID-19. There’s been a shift in focus, and your human resource department needs to learn to adapt to it.
How Advanced Tools Can Help HR Professionals
Since the HR’s role has been expanded, perhaps not in the sheer number of tasks but in their complexity, it’s crucial to ensure that your HR department is ready to take on the challenges.
The best way to prepare the department is by training them and providing them with advanced tools that can assist and make at least some of the tasks a bit easier.
There’s no shortage of HR training software and other useful tools, so let’s check out some of the best ones.
ProProfs HR Training Software
The HR staff is one of the most critical assets of any business. They’re in charge of many vital processes, and their jobs are everything but easy.
Since their roles are ever-evolving, it’s essential to provide them with a chance to develop their skills and level up their knowledge. The best way to do it is through HR training software.
ProProfs HR training software is a Learning Management System (LMS) solution that offers extensive online courses, which can add great value to your human resource department.
With topics covering everything from compliance training to workplace ethics, these courses can help your department stay up to date on all the latest HR trends.
Additional features of online HR training courses with ProProfs include:
- Course creation
- Quiz Maker
- Course attendance monitoring
- Completion rates
- Performance analytics
- Engagement report
- Virtual classroom software
- Cross-device compatibility
ProProfs is a comprehensive LMS software solution that can be exceptionally useful for your HR team during COVID-19.
ClearCompany HRM
ClearCompany HRM platform can help your HR department with a variety of different tasks. It’s designed to assist with recruiting, onboarding, and training employees.
Some of its most useful features include:
- Applicant tracking
- Customized onboarding
- Performance management
- Workforce planning and analytics
- Engagement and recognition tools
The solution is easy to integrate into existing systems, and its user-friendly design ensures that there’s virtually no learning curve for an HR department.
Now when your HR department needs to focus on the “human” aspect of their job, it’s vital that their administrative tasks take the spotlight.
It’s a well-known fact that many administrative tasks are time-consuming, and manually doing them can quickly turn into drudgery.
To help take some tasks off your HR staff’s hands, you should consider investing in UZIO.
It’s a SaaS solution that can help take care of tasks such as payroll processing, benefits management, workers’ compensation, and more.
With many of the menial processes streamlined, you can expect your HR department to focus on more important things.
If you’re worried about boosting your employee engagement and handling many of the complex tasks that have arisen due to COVID-19, you might want to consider Zenefits.
It’s an all-encompassing SaaS that can make your HR department’s job easier.
You can use it as an employee social network tool and as an intricate HR platform.
Your department can use it to send automated offer letters to new hires, do background checks on applicants, enable self-onboarding, automate workflows, manage the contingent workforce, and more.
Kronos is a cloud platform that enables you to manage the entire workforce – from the moment a talented applicant is hired to the moment they retire.
It’s feature-packed and has integrated tools for:
- Payroll
- Workforce management
- Applicant tracking
- Performance reviews
- Talent acquisition
- Compensation management
- Time-tracking
- Scheduling
Kronos is a robust solution that can help with virtually every HR task. However, since it offers so many features, it entails a steep learning curve.
BambooHR can be an ideal solution for small to mid-sized businesses that are trying to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can use the software to enhance many HR processes, including collecting and analyzing data on employees, hiring new talents, onboarding employees, and even developing a strong company culture.
It’s a powerful HR software that doesn’t have as many features as some of the previously mentioned ones but still delivers excellent results.
It’s easy to integrate with existing systems, and the learning curve is virtually nonexistent.
Gusto
Gusto can be an excellent choice for small businesses having trouble with accounting. It’s a simple HR solution for processing payrolls, benefits, managing onboarding, tracking time, etc.
You can even use Gusto to handle taxes and get W-2s and 1099s prepared at no additional cost.
The software is easy to use and get accustomed to, it integrates well with existing systems, and handles many accounting processes with ease.
If you’re looking for a smaller, simpler solution to handle employee monitoring, TimeWorksPlus can help you out.
It’s a smartphone app that’s excellent for tracking time and keeping an eye on your new remote employees.
Some of its features are:
- Clocking in/out
- Viewing announcements
- Viewing time-off balances
- Submitting time-off requests
- Supervisors can enjoy additional features:
- Seeing who’s clocked in
- Clocking in/out multiple employees
- Viewing location information
- Approving/denying time-off requests
eddyHR is a cloud-based solution designed for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. It can help you in the talent headhunting process, hiring, and improving your employee retention rates.
At an affordable price, you’ll get an abundance of useful features, including the standard HR tools for time-tracking and payroll management, as well as tools for training tracking, people management, and more.
Paycor is an HR and payroll solution in one. Among other things, You can use it to import employee hours, create surveys, track attendance, compensation planning, and handle taxes.
The software established an excellent reputation among small and medium-sized business owners. It has received great praise from software review sites, and it can be a great tool for your HR department.
Give the Best to Your HR Team
COVID-19 has impacted businesses across niches, and it takes time and effort for everyone to get back on track.
If you want your company to get out of this pandemic without suffering through layoffs and budget cuts, you need to invest in your HR department.
With the right HR training software and advanced HR tools, you can ensure the utmost satisfaction of your employees and take your business to the next level.
