New Trends in Employment Engagement Post Covid-19 Pandemic

Covid-19, the deadly virus, brought the entire world to a sudden halt like no one had ever imagined. This virus limited human connections and this led the organizations to stop and think of how to move forth. Organizations lost their profits, lost their best talents and they struggle to retain the employees leading a lot of employees to lose their jobs. However, as Yadav et al. (2020) mentioned in their research, organizations started challenging the pandemic situation after some time and started to think new ways to engage employees from where ever they are to meet organizational goals and save the employees. Because of this, organizations started moving from traditional working culture to a remote working culture with the help of technology (Yadav et al., 2020; Saxena, Bagga, and Gupta, 2021; Nisha Chanana, 2020).

The fear is still there, and the biggest challenge for the organizations is to research, how to keep the employees safe and engaged. To become highly engaged the most important factors to be considered are the job role, the environment, and the culture. All the organizations now figure out that the concept of “working from home”, will never leave (Yadav et al., 2020). Though this is not a new trend, organizations did not practice the method of working from home because the team spirit, monitoring of performance, team meetings, and many more were locked in the frame called the workplace. However, the pandemic showed the organizational leaders how this would help the organization save money. With this being revealed organization started creating and using new platforms to keep the employees engaged to get a competitive advantage. Tools like Gamification, online books, online team building activities, online reward systems, online appraisal systems, and online challenges and competitions helped organizations to improve their mentality and helped them to be highly engaged and perform well to reach organizational goals. (Nisha Chanana, 2020; Yadav et al., 2020). Even though the employees work from home, the culture-tech platform helped them to get together in making decisions, helping each other’s, learn things, be creative, and to be innovative (Saxena, Bagga, and Gupta, 2021).

With the Covid-19 virus started leaving the world, organizations have focused on Phadnis's (2020 as cited in Yadav et al., 2020) idea, which is the “Hybrid model” where the organizations can have employees working from home and from the office. This trend has benefited employees to live their lives and balance work and life to the maximum. Baker (2021), talks about nine trends, which occurred post-Covid-19 that help the organizations to achieve goals.

No. 1: Increase in remote working

the study by Baker (2021), says that the number of remote workers has increased from 30% to 48% after the Covid-19 pandemic and therefore now organizations look into ways which improve employee well-being which will result in having highly engaged employees to meet organizational goals.

No. 2: Expanded data collection

Employers tend to use different software and systems to monitor employee engagement, well-being, and productivity. This has been there before the pandemic but there is an acceleration of employee monitoring tool usage after the pandemic to monitor the organization's performance.

No. 3: Contingent worker expansion

Organizations came to know that contingent workers help organizations to reduce costs during the Covid-19 pandemic times. The employers use this as an opportunity to reduce the number of full-time employees and now they look into ways of having contingent employees to have a competitive advantage and to save money for the organization. However, the study further says that the HR team in the organization should look into methods to get the best out of the employees.

No. 4: Expanded employer role as a social safety net

With the pandemic, most employers try to find ways to help their employees and families to survive the crisis. Not only the employees now organizations look into ways to help the community it is in too and that helps the organization to be highlighted in the business world and give the best for the employees to be highly engaged.

No. 5: Separation of critical skills and roles

According to Baker (2021), the pandemic has helped the organization to identify that there is no such thing as critical skills and everyone can be developed to play a critical role in an organization. what organizations need to do is help employees to learn new skills which will help them to grow not only in their particular role but in many other roles in the organization which will help the business to grow fast.

No. 6: (De-)Humanization of employees

With the pandemic, some organizations have put employee safety on top of organizational goals and some have put organizational goals over employee safety. Both have worked equally to bring benefits to the organization. Nevertheless, it is the employers’ responsibility to choose what is best for the organization. In addition, find a balance in these two ways that will help them to survive in the business world longer.

No. 7: Emergence of new top-tier employers.

With the pandemic, employees have started to be more and more curious about what is happening with the top management. In addition, the organizations that have practiced becoming more transparent with the pandemic have shown increased engagement levels of employees.

No. 8: Transition from designing for efficiency to designing for resilience

Organizations started looking for more flexible ways to improve employee engagement. People from various diversities started to be included in this process to have the best decisions, which will benefit the employees.

No. 9: Increase in organization complexity

To survive the crisis, organizations started looking into ways to increase the complexity of the organization, which gives them space for new employees with new knowledge and technologies to be creative and to be successful in the business world.

Even though organizations have so many benefits from the new trends that arose after the Covid-19 pandemic, they should still be careful not to exhaust their employees. Research shows that with the workload, employees now have to take level on weekends too (Yadav et al., 2020), which will lead the employees to be burned out. Organizations should work on having techniques to give the employees mental and physical freedom to boost themselves. Once the employees feel that the organization is thinking more about them even after the pandemic eases, other than achieving goals, they will do their best to take the organization on the growth journey.  

 

References:

Baker, M. (2021). 9 Future of Work Trends Post-COVID-19. [Online] Gartner. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/9-future-of-work-trends-post-covid-19 [Accessed: 21 April 2022]

Nisha Chanana, S., 2020. Employee engagement practices during COVID‐19 lockdown. Journal of Public Affairs.                                                                                                                                        

Saxena, M., Bagga, T. and Gupta, S., 2021, January. Hr during covid-19 era: Study on recent HR transformations through technological tools and trends. In 2021 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (Confluence) (pp. 110-113). IEEE.  

Yadav, S., Dubey, A., Chawla, P. and Jha, S., 2020. Employee Engagement Strategy for Employees Working in Virtual Environment in the IT Industry.