Human Resources & COVID - Is this what we were trained to do?

Okay, who saw that coming? When we first started hearing reports of a potential pandemic, I don’t think anyone in Human Resources rushed out to create company work procedures around the effects of such an event…at least, I didn’t. After all, most of us had some versions of protocols in place, for the world had weathered health crises before, several within my career. However, none of those taxed our current work instructions to this level. We may have added addendums to leave policies, amended office closing procedures for weather or made recommendations regarding travel, but with minimal overall impact. Covid-19 has pushed us all. By mid-March it was clear this was not a typical health scare. We were fundamentally unprepared for this type of a crisis.

No one had a full pandemic plan covered in the employee handbook. Now we had to write one from scratch…and quickly! In order to do our jobs as human resources officers and organizational leaders, we had to take a step back and regroup. But while we paused to assess the situation, we also simultaneously moved forward creating plans, safeguards, and new office policies. We had to evaluate national and local government pronouncements with no guidelines as to how and if they affected our organizations. Health recommendations became outdated while we were publishing them for distribution to our employees. It was a never-ending cycle of processing information for dissemination and rewriting it based on new information as it was going out the door.

My first large-scale concern was how to safely and effectively keep those working in the field safe, while looking to close all of our offices. Considering the geography of the pandemic, not all areas were hit with the same issues at the same time. Nonetheless, policies had to be created to document the new procedures and processes, taking guidelines from different states (and some even differing by city) under consideration. How do we send everyone home? How do employees who have to travel do so safely? What kind of protocols are necessary to secure 750 employees from locations across the US? How does the collaborative work of our industry continue? Do our employees fall under any federal government guidelines? And while it is HR’s responsibility to work for the larger company at hand, our company doesn’t exist without its workforce. How can we not only protect our employees but make sure they are supported at home or on the road, to safely and effectively get the work done?... And that was the easy stuff.

Now here we stand, nearly six months after creating the initial work-from-home protocols and I’m asking myself how and when to safely reopen the offices to full capacity and if we ever will return to what was the “normal” before this all started. We are no closer to receiving consistent, unchallenged information about health and safety. The rules and guidelines from governmental organizations continue to evolve rapidly. Yet our work in HR remains the same: protect our organization and our employees for the long term. Each decision must be weighed not only for today but for three years from now. We are not given the luxury of working solely in the present because part of our responsibility is to look ahead. To base our new and evolving work instructions on at-the-moment information alone is asking for trouble in the future. How on earth do we prepare for that level of unknown?

So what is a Human Resources Leader to do? How do we prepare to move forward while safeguarding our companies now and down the road? The short answer is simple: we do the best we can; we do the next right thing. The playbooks are now written, and addendums and corrections come regularly. Communication between HR, leadership and our employees is being fine-tuned and we are honing in on what works best for our business. We are gradually opening offices, allowing employees to make decisions for themselves about their comfort and safety while instituting broad company-wide policies to protect those most vulnerable. We are working with currently available information and when that information changes, we change with it. We remain nimble, and cover our bases as much as we can with an eye on the future and potential ramifications. This is what we are trained to do.

No other group of HR professionals has faced this kind of challenge before. We are paving the way, brick by brick, for all those who come after us. What are you doing to ensure a smooth corporate future for your people?