Myzheleen Roman

MBA 2E – Human Resource Management

Dr. Rechelle Guzman

 Identify the five (5) HR functions that have been affected by the pandemic
1. Human Resource & Workforce Planning
The sudden shift in work culture has brought new challenges for Human Resource. The
top priority for HR professionals is now crisis response and how to keep the employees
engaged, provide the right communication channels, tools for remote work, and to have
a strategic and effective workforce plan. Some of the companies experienced reduced
hours, adjusted goals, furloughs, or even layoffs to cover the losses of the company
caused by the crisis.

2. Employee Recruitment & Onboarding

Recruitment and onboarding process is one of the challenges brought by pandemic.
Employee recruitment, training, orientation are factors to make an employee engage
and also, a contributor to the employee’s success. However, the current pandemic has
made the hiring process more challenging than ever. With social distancing and other
exceptional circumstances, as well as the fear of the coronavirus looming large,
recruitment and training have become even more difficult.

3. Performance monitoring & Management

The popular word most people describe the world condition right now is new normal.
New normal due to pandemic brings uncertain things. The change has its very fast pace
that we (employee/business owners) crams on how to cope up to save and recover our
work and business. Many companies switch to work from home for their employees to
follow the mandated rules imposed by the government. As the client and employee
facing work changed to email and video calls/meeting, HR professional having difficult
times working. As we all know their functions is all about people inside the company,
but how will they monitor the people if they are working home based. How will they
continue to connect the people inside the company since they serve as bridge to each
employee? HR managers are trying to keep their workers productive, motivated,
engaged and connected while adopting to the new normal. These difficulties are
challenging that the HR professional have to surpass. They adjust their approach to the
present crisis. Since work home based, they have to get the focused of the employee to
work smart, to be goal oriented and making sure that employees are working effectively
and efficient. the situation right now is like tug of war of HR employees and employees
being home and their family’s situation.

4. Learning & Development

In this Human Resource function might be a hardest at first since the employees are
mostly work from home it’s really hard to engage them in learning, trainings in their
spare time. Hearing the working from home word before brought havoc and issues
around the media, social media expressing their sides. But because of HR Plans for
remote working, they educate and help them to adjust in the situation it became an
opportunity to the employees. They made the employee realized that it is no so bad to
 work at home but it also helps them to spend their time with their family while working
it motivates them.
5. Rewarding Employees
HR foster their employee’s safety and connectivity during these though times. Evaluate
the system they used to follow. Remote employees are mostly disengaging and
sometimes quit the majority of the work force shifted to work from home. With many
distractions at home, it is easy to snatch their engagement from the job. A recognition is
an easy way keep their focus at work. It is also a way to express that they are important
and you care about them not only in work related but also for their health and well-
being. It is also a way to focus them to core values and goal of organization. If you see
behavior that should be rewarded like being timely, effective, efficient don’t wait for a
chance to recognize them. Rewards can be a card that tells them that they are
recognize, it can be a lunch to treat them or it can be a formal recognition organize
gathering. These crises brought by pandemic can be a crisis that brings the company
down, or an opportunity that will make a company and employees stronger. It will
depend on how will they take it. We are only certain for uncertain.

 Discuss your fearless forecast of the new normal delivery of functions in this time of pandemic
in your perspective industry.

We all know that HR is one of the most demanding corporate positions. It is also essential since
they are the one who manage the company’s’ most important assets. The people. To relate
these 5 functions to my current organization I can say that Pandemic has caused a lot of changes
and adjustments to the company specially to the Human Resource Section. Since Manulife is a
multinational company, the management is continues acquiring new technologies to prepare
the organization transitioning to remote work. During the Pandemic some the employees left
the company under certain circumstances but Manulife continuous recruitment and acquiring
new talents even during pandemic helps the HR to make a strategic and effective workforce
planning. For the recruitment & Onboarding since 2020 hiring process takes place remotely,
without face-to-face interactions between HR and applicant, interviews are done via Skype and
phone calls. HR maintains open communication to monitor the progress of the applicants. For
Performance Monitoring Management all employees are provided Daily Deliverables Tracker,
Monthly Self-assessment and Production Management Tool (PMT) where we logged our task as
a monitoring to the employee’s accuracy and timeliness. Human resource personals are closely
monitoring the learning and development and this is also being done virtually or using the
provided learning platforms in our organization. Rewarding Employees are also part of human
resource functions this became challenging since we switch to remote work. Our HR Team came
up with the idea wherein they acquired new platform where employees show their appreciation
and recognize their colleagues which you can earn points.
In my observation our Human Resource Team in Manulife are prepared and able to deliver the
five functions of Human Resource during new normal. I can see that they are also ready to face
the uncertainties that new normal might bring with also the help of the top management of the
organization that allows them, to acquire new technology and tools to reach and monitor
employees.