Essay on What Are the Effects of the COVID 19 Pandemic on Labor Force?

COVID 19 pandemic has had a huge impact in our society today, It has led to the lockdown of many states leading to sates restricting movement within the country or out of the country. The COVID 19 pandemic has led to the meltdown of our economy leading to many businesses relying on the human resource management to come up with resilient strategies in hopes of salvaging their business. This Pandemic has led to a lot of problems in our Human resource sector. Hence the question how has it affected the labor force in our businesses today? We will see how the pandemic has affected the recruitment of employees, the payrates and the development of a business.

COVID 19 led to the death of millions of citizens in various states. This impacted the human resource as it had to hire a new lot of employees. More resources had to be used to train many more human resource personnel to help in staffing of healthcare companies (Martocchio, 2019). Some companies lost up to 50% of their workers and with people dealing with the stigmatization from the disease led to most of them quitting. The human resource department faced a huge challenge in trying to find qualified personnel. For example, in Canada they had to get employees from other states to fully staff their companies and provide services effectively. Some of the companies mainly in the healthcare department had to opt employ students to stand in as qualified medical personnel. Thousands of dollars were used in trying to ensure quality services were offered.

As the healthcare department increased their work load most of the other departments i.e. the tourism sector, the entertainment sector faced a lot of challenges trying to stay afloat. It was up to the human resource department to try and ensure that most of these businesses did not collapse. The department had to come up with strategies plans and ways to help the businesses be afloat. They had to ensure this solution did not affect the services rendered (Mala, 2020). One of the solutions was there were layoffs in most departments. Thousands o f people lost their jobs. The Human resource department had to reduce the salaries and remove the bonuses given to the staff. This led to most of the staff including the human resource not having medical covers. This led to a lot of debts and high bills for the workers leading to reduced productivity reducing the quality of services offered by most companies. Some of the Human resource management staff had to be laid off too. This led to unemployment to most of the Human resource management staff.

With the pandemic came new COVID 19 protocols to be followed by business owners. Some of these protocols included: social distancing, the company ensuring all the staff was vaccinated, and they limited the number of employees who were to personally report to work. It was up to the Human resource department to ensure all this protocol were followed (Caligiuri et al, 2020). This led to most the employers working virtually from home. The increase in these protocols led to companies using a lot of resources hence the Human resource department was unable to create a budget that could enable them to pay their workers. These protocols have challenged the human resource personnel in trying to create budgets to enable their workers to be well compensated and provide the best of services to their clients.

Human resource is given the mandate to ensure that the company provides the best of services to its consumers. With the challenges mentioned above it is important to address them and try on ways we can resolve them (Butterick & Charlwood, 2021). The government and insurance companies should amend their policies to cater for the COVID 19 demands to businesses and unburden the human resource management in trying to come up with impossible decisions during this pandemic. With these policies in place it will help the Human resource properly manage their employees and ensure that the services are well provided instead of spending thousand of hours in trying to create resilience strategies in their businesses.

With the meltdown of the economy my curiosity is, will these companies ever pick up from the damage caused by the pandemic? As a Human resource management student what are some of the changes I can bring to the table in trying to resolve some of these problems. I personally think that companies should adopt technologies and new innovations that are emerging everyday in trying to better the performance of the companies. The Human resource can use the Artificial intelligence technology in ensuring that the staff provide quality work (Strzelec & Przytuła, 2020). In terms of compensation the Human resource team should come up with new income generating projects to ensure increase in the companies’ income and enable them to cater for the extra expenses. The human resource should also come up with healthcare plans for their staff that should cater for future pandemics.

According to a research done in Jordan the Human resource management has taken the workplace online proving online teaching programs to help in the betterment of company production. This online transition has made it difficult for the human resource to monitor work proficiency by workers. The human resource department has been forced to hire personnel online without interacting with them physically (Strzelec & Przytuła, 2020). This has been hard as they cannot determine the work proficiency. Most of the researches agree that this pandemic has made it difficult for the human resource to do their jobs.

In conclusion, there is evidence that the pandemic has affected the Human resource Management negatively. It has made their work more difficult. The Human resource management are unable to properly staff their organizations, Check the proficiency of their workers and most importantly there are not able to properly manage their finances and ensure proper compensation to their workers. The human resource plays an important role in ensuring the continuity of our business. Programs are coming up everyday and are educating our human resource personnel on better ways in making the work place more conducive for their workers, they are also providing ways in which the HRM can transition easily to the online market by adapting the new technologies that are emerging daily.

References.

Martocchio, J. J. (2019). Human resource management. Urbana-Champaign.

Mala, W. A. (2020). How COVID-19 Changes the HRM Practices (Adapting One HR Strategy May Not Fit to All). Available at SSRN 3736719.

Caligiuri, P., De Cieri, H., Minbaeva, D., Verbeke, A., & Zimmermann, A. (2020). International HRM insights for navigating the COVID-19 pandemic: Implications for future research and practice.

Butterick, M., & Charlwood, A. (2021). HRM and the COVID‐19 pandemic: How can we stop making a bad situation worse?. Human Resource Management Journal.

Strzelec, G., & Przytuła, S. (2020). Re-vision of future trends in human resource management (HRM) after COVID-19. Text design and typesetting: Marcin Szadkowski Cover design: Marcin Szadkowski Language editing: Lidia Pernak Adjustment: Dominika Więzik, Małgorzata Pająk, 12(4), 70-90.