Questions about HR Transformation ANSWERED! ft. Richa Kaur

Q: How did you deal with the pandemic at work and did it change your approach towards employee?

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Richa Kaur:

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Pandmeic was all about shifting gears you know. The need of the hour was to quickly adapt to the situation and be there for our employees. You know, at most the priority was to make sure that we are communicating as much as we can and connecting with them and, you know, just to make sure that we're there for them and to remove any kind of apprehension, especially in second wave, there was lot of fear around everywhere. So, and when I say connection and communication, it's just not, you know, having lot of sessions. It is also about, you know, picking up the phone and asking every employee who's affected or whose family is affected. How are you? Is everything okay? How are you dealing with a situation? So I would make sure that I would call individually every employee.

I would tell the managers to connect to each employee to make sure they're all okay. You know, and for their safety, we had started conducting vaccination drives, not just for the employees, but to make sure that for the families as well. And if they have families who, you know if there were people who needed financial assistance for their families, we would also provide that. So that is how we did deal with our employees in pandemic.

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Q: How did the pandemic affect your role?

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Richa Kaur:

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Individually, you know, I had to make sure I am positive and to do that, I removed all the distractions, you know, which was coming from everywhere. I completely, completely focused on being there for my people, being there for the people who needed us the most, whether it is internal or external while internal, we were there with, you know, with all the help we could give them externally also, you know, because LinkedIn was full of posts, people, losing jobs, people, you know, so I would make sure that, you know, if I have a relevant opportunity in my organization, I give them the priority. I contact them individually asking them to share resumes if I could help them. And if I don't have any relevant opportunity in my organization, I would, you know, refer them to a known organization or known people just to make sure that we are there helping each other, you know, in this crisis.

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Q: How has HR changed, what does the future of work look like?

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Richa Kaur:

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Most importantly, the importance of digitalization while I've talked about digitalization, let me put stress that HR in itself, that role on HR of children itself has changed a lot in this pandemic. You know, we realize how important the HR is and yes, digitization in HR, you know, we've ,had to adopt various modes of virtual recruitment or onboarding employee engagement, communication, you know, doing all the kind of sessions, making, engaging them through different types of types of virtual platform. Okay. Oh, then obviously this brings to the future. I mean the future of work is hybrid.

So we have to, you know, make sure that we adapt to not analytics digitization and all of that. Plus there has been a gradual shift to, you know, the gig economy organizations have started accepting freelancers and part-timers as their, you know, future works workforce. And very importantly, you know, this pandemic has made not just HRs, but every leader realized the importance of AI, which is emotional skills, you know, and the importance of empathy. So going forward, empathy would be, you know, all relevant skills, which would be required for every manager. Every leader, every HR in every organization is what I feel has shifted in, you know pandemic.