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HR professionals need to rethink how their organization can become more agile in order to react quickly and successfully to the next crisis, the shortage of skilled workers or the sudden shift in demand.

To do this, HR must become an internal driver of change in their organization and move away from transactional service-based activities like answering vacation claims or payroll questions and instead focus on creating an employee-centric approach to resilience.

Forward-looking organizations recognized the need to change human resources ahead of the pandemic. For example, in a 2019 survey of 1,362 HR executives in 55 countries, 57% of KPMG consultants found that HR would quickly become irrelevant if it wasn’t modernized.

Agility, although a buzzword, has become indispensable, requiring faster and more informed decisions at all levels of an organization, the breakdown of rigid internal hierarchies, and the development of a highly collaborative internal culture that is unified in its goals.

HR departments need to play a more important role in ensuring that employees are adaptable, quick on their feet, ready and able to seize new opportunities and adopt technologies that increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the employee experience.

The HR department needs to ensure that mental wellbeing is viewed as a priority by the senior management of their organization and as a strategic pillar for greater resilience across the organization.

More collaboration and more decentralized decision-making are needed to encourage innovation, experimentation and knowledge acquisition. To do this, HR needs to ensure that managers are using technology to interact more meaningfully with employees, and foster a team culture where sharing ideas to improve performance or productivity is easy and bringing together dispersed workforces.

Two-way communication should be genuine to ensure that employees and managers fully understand each other and that employees see how their work fits in with a company’s longer-term goals.

In addition, HR departments should help develop a culture that empowers teams and values ​​their ideas. Teams should be in control of making small changes that improve their operations without the need to obtain multiple approvals.

This is made easier when companies use collaboration platforms, as regular communication ensures that managers have visibility into their teams and understand the adjustments that may be required to support employee productivity and engagement.

The cultural development of HR advocates should include learning and development so that employees are motivated to expand their skills and know where to find the resources they need. A wide range of content should be readily available, whether it be documentation that meets an immediate requirement, or more detailed video content and other tools.

In general, the HR department needs to be in touch with all stakeholders and view the organization as if it were looking from the outside. Companies that use Agile Workforce Analytics have an advantage here.

Advanced workforce analytics give the HR department the ability to create various positive or negative scenarios related to recruitment, retention, restructuring and reintegration, and provide the agility necessary if conditions suddenly change.

HR professionals who use analytics can plan employee scenarios according to various parameters that they can set in relation to company goals. Each scenario shows the impact on cash flow and productivity so that business can continue with minimal disruption.

With the ability to plan what might happen using a number of possible scenarios, HR automatically increases its role within an organization and feeds its unique insights into critical decisions made at the board level.

Of course, there are many facets of HR that professionals cannot afford to neglect. The introduction of automation and technology that enables employees to remotely meet their own needs will relieve the HR department of much of the routine administrative burden.

HR can hardly become a strategic source of advice when it still has to enter data into multiple systems and manually correlate it to get a remainder of insights. Hence, it is equally important to get support and investment from the organization in digital HR transformation to support this work.

Even though companies have invested in employee support programs, employee welfare should be a higher priority than many companies currently do. A mentally resilient workforce contributes significantly to a resilient organization.

Deloitte, the global consulting firm, published an authoritative study last year that estimated poor mental health UK employers saw 45 billion presenterism and employee turnover each year.

The HR department needs to ensure that mental wellbeing is viewed as a priority by the senior management of their organization and is seen as a strategic pillar for greater resilience across the organization. The HR department should push for an explicit discussion of the issue from the boardroom and initiate cross-organizational initiatives that enable trained employees to look out for one another and refer those who have difficulties coping to more professional help.

To sum up, HR plays an important strategic role in increasing the overall resilience and agility of the company by providing insights into employees and detailed scenario planning, along with a more active culture of collaboration and decentralized decision-making.

HR departments must be ready to rise above the daily routine of administration, fire services and short-term problem solving. Then they become key partners in the organizational effort to build resilience and seize new opportunities.

About the author

Jeanette Wheeler is HR Director at MHR International.