Task-4

To study the actual situation in workplaces and identify what different sorts of restructuring
strategies that organizations are considering regarding returning employees and new work
procedures?

Before COVID-19, the journey toward the future of work was well underway as employers sought to improve
flexibility, connectivity, and the employee experience through technology. Though the last few months have been
difficult, they’ve only accelerated these advancements, and it’s comforting to know many of us are going through
the process of restructuring employee experiences and establishing plans for our next reality together.

One thing is certain, whatever comes next for us needs to start with a blueprint – similar to building a house.  So,
what is the secret to designing a new, engaging employee experience and rebuilding employee productivity. Just like
how HVAC, plumbing, and electrical systems are needed to turn a house into a home, components such as
technology, teams, and leadership are the connection points for an organization to operate smoothly

1. The foundation

Strategies should start with having purpose-built leadership throughout the organization. Comparable to the
foundation of a home, one need to have a resilient base that will withstand unpredictable and difficult conditions.
Lean on current leadership to help plan for post-COVID-19 strategies. They will help you deliver the core beliefs of
the company to employees and show them how you’re prioritizing them.

Get leaders involved early to lay a proper foundation for positive change:

a. Set up a regular cadence of communication, and be honest – employees will appreciate even hard truths.
b. Show leaders how the HCM technology can facilitate that communication through multiple formats like
email, text messages/SMS, mobile push notifications, and even embedded video.
c. Get leaders up to speed on how the organization is feeling – introduce them to employee spot survey results
or the other methods you use to collect employee feedback.
d. Make sure leaders are tuned in to HR’s strategic priorities and that you can justify your plans to them in a
clear way – doing this up front will keep them on board throughout the reopening and recovery process.

2. The structure

Just like the structure of a house requiring rough-ins, framing, and walls, the structure of an organization sits on top
of foundational elements and makes room to build out more. Planning for recovery means ensuring the structure you
have in place will be a major asset in creating a safe and productive post-COVID work experience.

Having the right HCM technology will significantly support this framework. HR, payroll, and workforce
management technologies are developed to support the organization’s needs, directly reducing stress and
administrative hassle for people from an HR and operations perspective and for the employees. These tools
empower all levels of an organization to do meaningful, fulfilling work, increasing their productivity during trying
times.
3. The roof

The roof completes the framework for a post-COVID-19 recovery strategy – just like it protects your house from
outside elements. In our case, this means having an engaged and motivated workforce that helps organizations stay
productive and manage change successfully. How do you accomplish this in the next normal?

a. Measure performance goals and ensure objectives can be achieved: Define fair, reachable goals for evaluating
true productivity and engagement. Consider reviewing your current performance plans and measure actual
performance for this calendar year against the goals they’ve been assigned in your HCM system. This exercise
will help you better understand how to adjust your approach to the disruption we’ve all experienced.
b. Broadcast employee recognition and their stewardship of the organization: In uncertain times, recognition is
certain to influence productivity and encourage a better workforce experience. Your HR technology can help
facilitate various forms of recognition.

Critically evaluate how different organizations are crafting strategies for safety measurements
due to Covid-19?
Organizations strategies for safety measurements – Overview:

Workforce Protection . Travel/movement to work

. Entry to worksite
. Employee health policy measures

Employee Protection . Personal protective equipment

. Workplace distancing and workstation barriers
. Sanitization measures
. Worksite facility conditions
. Public health knowledge and capability-building
Non-employee Protection . Social distancing measures
. Sanitization measures
. Limitations against exposure to individuals
. Preventions against material contamination
Business Process Adaptations . Physical workspace adaptations
. Digital workspace adaptations
. Operational and productivity process adaptations
. Communication and Continuous improvement
adaptations
Employer-led Public Health Interventions . Detection and tracing
. Personal behavior reinforcement

Industry-wide Safeguards . Governance and councils

. Standards and Protocols
 Elucidate challenges of HR department to ensure employee trust regarding safeguarding against
Covid-19 in organization?

To better understand not only workers’ interest in returning to the workplace, but also help chart the ideal path
forward, we used focus groups to gather information about workers’ pre–COVID-19 workplace experience and
satisfaction, their experience transitioning out of the office, their current work experience and satisfaction. As
companies start to rethink and rebuild, it’s useful for them to understand what worked for employees in their prior
workplace as well as which aspects of it needed improvement. Our research identified some key factors that defined
the workplace experience and ensured employee trust regarding safeguarding against Covid-19 in organization:

1. Gain employees trust: Trust is defined as “our willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of others because
we believe they have good intentions and will behave well toward us. Leaders can build and maintain trust
by acting with competence and intent. Competence refers to the ability to execute; to follow through on
what you say you will do. Intent refers to the meaning behind a business leader’s actions, taking decisive
action from a place of genuine empathy and true care for stakeholders’ wants and needs.
2. Vaccinations: Workers and employees will return to work happily if the HR department can provide
vaccinations to all employees and Some workers—particularly those living with or caring for at-risk family
members (e.g., the elderly or the immunocompromised) will have no problem returning to work.
3. Sanitation and ventilation: A safe environment to return to includes cleanliness—both in terms of what
workers can see and what goes on behind the scenes—and ventilation systems. The employees will feel
comfortable and will increase their work productivity when they see sanitization and ventilation.
4. Transportation: Not surprisingly, a safe commute to and from the workplace seems to be a major concern,
particularly for those in big cities who rely on public transportation. So, the workers will return to
organization to work if the organization provides them transport facility in the epidemic.
5. Competence: While some things are out of businesses’ control, there are still many others that are in the
control of leaders—providing a sanitized work environment, respecting employees’ different needs and
concerns, communicating transparently, and infusing their actions in these areas with purpose and integrity.
Competence is a key component of trust, and organizations should communicate and demonstrate
competence in areas they can control. Additionally, earning trust through competence and supporting
capabilities can positively influences behaviors

 Recommend suggestions for HR department on how to formulate effective yet efficient return to work
policy?

HR department can formulate effective yet efficient return to work policy is given below:

1. Co-assess current work environment regarding back to work readiness

2. Setting the course for a tailored path back to work
3. Develop concepts/solutions
4. Develop roadmap for the path back to safe work
5. Develop Roadmap for the back to safe work
6. Implement Solution
7. Evaluate & literate
8. Ongoing support/check-ins
 Task-3
 To study the actual situation in workplaces and identify what different sorts of restructuring strategies that
organizations are considering regarding employee termination or layoff?

Generally speaking, an organization that decides to eliminate redundant employees does so by using four broad strategies:
attrition, voluntary termination, early retirement incentives and compulsory termination.

Attrition, in which firms do not replace a person who leaves, is the simplest method. With this approach, employees have
the opportunity to exercise free choice in deciding whether to stay or leave, and thus the potential for conflict and feelings of
powerlessness is minimized. At the same time, however, attrition may pose serious problems for management, because it is
unplanned and uncontrollable.

Voluntary termination, which includes buy-out offers, is a second approach to downsizing a workforce. The main
advantage of a buy-out is that it gives employees a choice, which tends to reduce some of the stigma.

Early retirement incentives (ERI), in which a company offers more generous retirement benefits in return for an
employee’s promise to leave at a certain time in the future, is a third downsizing strategy and one that is often part of a larger
buy-out scheme. Sometimes, early retirement offers are staggered to prevent a mass exodus. Retention bonuses with different
quit dates may be used to ensure an orderly exit. From an organizational viewpoint, managers assume that early retirement
opens up promotional opportunities.

Compulsory termination, in which departing employees are given no choice, is the final downsizing strategy and is typical
of plant closures and the wholesale elimination of departments or business units. Although it is, of course, unappealing to
employees, the managers who make the decisions do have the opportunity to design and implement criteria based on the
needs of the business.13 Eliminating jobs or entire business units also makes it less likely that employees will prevail in
lawsuits alleging discrimination.

 Critically evaluate the strategy of laying off for organizational survival?

Once the decision to implement layoffs has been made, a variety of decision criteria are available to determine who goes and
who stays. Generally speaking, employers are free to use whatever criteria they wish in terminating employees as long
as the criteria:

• Don’t discriminate based on membership in a protected class.

• Are not arbitrary or capricious.

• Are based on legitimate business reasons.

Across-the-board cuts in every department are perhaps the least effective downsizing option. Such cuts emphasize
standardized treatment of employees, but they ignore the strategic importance of different departments to a firm’s overall
success and ignore different performance levels of employees.

Identifying specific departments or functions based on strategic importance is a more enlightened way to go. In this
scenario, companies try to retain pivotal talent—those employees with skill sets needed to execute business strategies in
the coming years. A firm may move in stages, first selecting specific departments or functions, and then turning to a
multiple-hurdle or funnel approach. In this approach, managers identify critical skill sets and then take explicit steps to
retain employees with those skills, letting them know how important they are to the organization’s future success. Job
performance becomes the most important factor when there are more people with critical skill sets than there are
available positions in the downsized organization. Generally speaking, employers tend to retain people who have
 performed well in the past and who have not had disciplinary problems. Unfortunately, in some organizations, the lack
of reliable and valid measurements of performance forces reliance on other criteria. Once the available pool of
employees is limited to those with critical skills, high performance and few, if any, disciplinary problems, and the firm
still has more workers than required—what is the next step? At this point, many employers use seniority or tenure with
the organization as the criterion for decision-making. Ultimately, reducing the workforce can be an opportunity to
address performance problems that have festered over the years and to terminate employees whose performance has
been weak. However, in all downsizing scenarios, sound professional practice requires that firms:

• Conduct adverse-impact analyses before implementing a strategy.

• Document the criteria and processes used in downsizing.

• Have results and materials reviewed by an attorney specializing in employment law.

 Identify the challenges that HR department will face due to the huge number of terminations caused by this
pandemic?

Consequences of employment downsizing are given below:

Effects on laid off individuals

Not surprisingly, laid off employees are often stressed out, particularly as their buy out packages dwindle. Layoff leads
to financial insecurity, which sets off depression. That, in turn, causes people to feel that they have little control over
events. Next comes hopelessness, sleeplessness, headaches, chronically upset stomach and fatigue.

Effects on survivors

Those who remain employed at a firm after downsizing often feel guilty and depressed. Loyalty and trust in management
decline after a downsizing, as do organizational commitment, job satisfaction and job involvement. At the same time,
stress levels, intentions to quit and actual level of voluntary turnover all increase, due at least in part to the loss of a sense
of personal control over important events in one’s life. The managers who do the firing are often overlooked as
casualties of the process, which is highly stressful and exhausting.

Effects on the organization

• Organizations which invest in “high-involvement” practices that strongly engage employees in the workplace help
maintain productivity. These high-involvement work practices cover a wide range of routines, from team-based
production to gain sharing and flexible work design, to information sharing and opportunities for training and
development. Workplace that continues to invest in such practices even during layoff mat avoid productivity losses.

• Human relationships and social networks generate learning and knowledge that become a firm’s institutional memory.
Because a single individual has many relationships in such an organization, indiscriminate downsizing has the potential
to inflict considerable damage on learning and memory capacity. Such a loss damages ongoing processes and operations,
forfeits contacts and may lead to lost business opportunities. Evidence indicates that damage to knowledge-based
organizations is far greater than might be implied by a simple tally of the number of individuals let go. Organizations at
greatest risk include those that operate in rapidly evolving industries, such as biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and
software, where survival depends on a firm’s ability to innovate constantly

• What about the effect of employment downsizing on innovation? Downsizing presents several obstacles to innovation,
including: • Risk-averse survivors. • Lack of resources for innovation. • Lack of talented employees. • Low levels of
employee morale and enthusiasm for innovation. • High workloads among survivors. When downsizing drags on over a
long period of time, employees’ enthusiasm for innovation also wanes as they reduce cooperation with co-workers and
 information exchanges with them. Interestingly, the size of a workforce reduction had no significant impact on
innovation

 Recommend suggestions for HR department on how to motivate existing employees about future uncertainty?

HR department can motivate existing employees about future uncertainty in specific manner. They are given below:

Provide direction, confidence and resilience

Employees look to leaders for reassurance, especially in times of instability. It is important that those in leadership
roles communicate clearly with managers and staff and demonstrate a clear commitment to employee health and
business sustainability. Let employees of all levels know the current plan and possibilities for the future. Understand
that employees are receiving conflicting forecasts and advice from the local, state, and national governments –not to
mention social media disinformation.

Be flexible
One of the biggest HR challenges during covid that companies are regularly facing is the scope of the disruption.
With schools and non-essential businesses closed or moving online, employees will need flexibility and
understanding as they try to re-establish a work-life balance. Companies can support employees who are quarantined
or self-isolated by expanding paid time off policies or facilitating them in working remotely.

Create guidelines and support networks for those working from home
Although only 5.3% of employees worked from home in 2018, remote work has quickly become the standard model
during the pandemic. Employers moving to a work-from-home system can support employees by establishing norms
and implementing a defined remote work policy that sets clear expectations for when team members are to be
available, how to communicate (via email, Slack, or another platform) and exactly what each team member is
responsible for. Make sure employees have the tech they need to perform the tasks expected of them. Most
importantly, give employees some breathing room to adjust to their new lifestyles. If their work doesn’t need to be
done during normal business hours, managers might do well to let employees create their own schedules and
determine what works best for them and their families. These are difficult times and individuals may be struggling
with unwell family members or general anxiety.