COVID-19 AND THE HR PROCESS
When the pandemic was declared, working remotely seemed to be quite vague. It’s always been hard for me to imagine a workday without live communication.
It’s been over a month under quarantine and 5 steps of acceptance are behind me now, so I stick to the rule if you can’t change the situation, change your attitude.
In this article, I’m going to share how forced circumstances affected HR processes in our company, how we found optimal solutions to HR tasks, and what our future goals are.
ABOUT SWITCHING TO REMOTE OPERATIONS
35% of 4xxi employees have worked remotely on an ongoing basis before the pandemic, so we managed to move other employees from office to home quite easily.
We provided all needed tech equipment such as laptops, desktop computers, devices for QA needs, etc. We took care of employees’ comfort and helped to improve their home workplaces by providing tables and chairs.
Our well-adjust business processes, including the HR process, allowed our company to rapidly switch to remote operations without any losses
ABOUT TASKS AND PROCESS. IMPACT OF COVID-19
I have a broad range of tasks: recruitment, onboarding, and employee motivation, maintaining HR brand, employee education, and self-development, corporate culture, and creating a friendly environment. Those important components of my job that you cannot physically feel, have a huge impact on the company’s reputation, employees’ attitude, and comfort level in teams.
I faced the most important question in March: how to transfer offline processes to online operations and how to organize work efficiently without results being impacted. But first thing’s first.
Recruitment
We have used Google services before while searching for new employees and interviewing them, so it wasn’t a problem to move all recruitment stages online (I guess one of a few differences is that now we need to turn on the camera more often).
The problem I faced is related to candidates’ attitudes to job search and I hear the sentence “Let’s do it after the quarantine” almost all the time. Without a doubt the uncertainty about the future affected a number of candidates that were ready to change their job.
But we continued looking for candidates using more recruiting tools and channels, cutting recruiting stages down to 1- 2 stages.
We also took advantage of our archive of candidates that we contacted before but did not move forwards at the time. This has helped us identify specialists and check their suitability for projects.
Due to well-accumulated contacts and mutual support with partner companies, we managed to prevent downtime and disruption to all of our projects
Onboarding
We use our own ERP system and Trello as tools that help new employees to adjust in the company, in these systems responsible employees assist newbies during their probation period.
The onboarding process is organized as follows: the newbie’s card is created in Trello and its flow has the following stages:
- Information tasks (learning about the company’s history and values, projects and business processes)
- Bureaucratic tasks (reading through and signing needed documents)
- Casual and fun stage (lunch with colleagues, listening to fun stories about the company, etc.)
- Self-management and time-management tasks
A newbie can control the adaptation flow themselves, can view which information should be read, which tasks should be covered. And we assist them to go through onboarding as easy as possible, so we monitor their success and involve other employees if needed.
In Trello we record results that show how a newbie completed their tasks and in our ERP we gather the feedback of the newbie and about them and track the probation period.
A newbie has a curator; and during the probation period we have monthly meetings to give feedback and learn about their wellbeing.
It turned out that the pandemic and the quarantine had little impact on this process. That happened because of our flexibility regarding recruitment and because we’ve always allowed employees to work from home.
Education and self-development.
Clearly, education and self-development of our employees is a way to increase efficiency and engagement and these are important factors of success.
Every 6 months we have a 360 degree review that allows employees to evaluate themselves, to give feedback about colleagues that they worked with and interacted with.
After we have review evaluations finalized and after we receive an evaluation by tech leads/curators/supervisors, we create self-development plans for each employee individually.
We finished another review just before the quarantine and started working on self-development plans.
There are two sides that are taken into account to set plan goals for each employee: the first side is our company, its development strategy, and skills that are needed for an employee so they can grow professionally and the second side is how interested an employee is to be more educated and to upgrade their skills and knowledge.
In addition, we host PHP-parties and other gatherings quite often, those were designed so our employees can learn how to act as speakers and share their knowledge and things they are interested in with others. These gatherings are not uncommon for our company and other employees (QAs, FEs, and PMs) have similar meetings.
We don’t forget about online education courses that we bought before COVID-19 started.
And soon, in July, we want to participate as speakers at an IT conference.
Anyway, all of the things mentioned above were online, so COVID-19 did not ruin this flow, moreover, it affected and required more involvement of curators in monitoring self-development plans and how each employee dealt with those.
Corporate culture. Climate, team spirit and events.
In 4xxi corporate culture as one of the company’s resources is priceless.
It has many components, and we, 4xxi employees, pay special attention to each component.
I can say that the quarantine caused a negative scenario of implementing the company’s strategy, it just postponed some of our plans.
The model of our compare culture is based on family principles.
We have a warm and friendly climate, often supervisors and PMs act as mentors, an employee can always seek advice from them.
Our values include professionalism, trust, respect, responsibility for results, initiatives and self-development. Being in good terms with your team is a key to effective work and healthy climate in the company.
Lack of personal interactions, not being able to feel the mood of others in online chats, these things have their impact on the ability to keep a positive climate within teams and our company, especially when the government calls on us to maintain the isolation and to avoid leaving houses.
COVID-19 affected this part of my job: it’s hard to track employees’ emotions on time, to track their mood, and to provide assistance if needed.
So how did we solve this issue?
We started holding more p2p meetings, more team meetups, and now we’re trying to diversify our leisure time by moving gatherings from offline to online.
For example, we gathered for online-gaming several times (“Quiz, Please!”, “What? Where? When?”, ‘Alias”, etc), and we had time to chat after the game.
We started running the company’s challenges on Instagram, sending newsletters and digests, planning time to spend it on learning English. We’re planning to gather people on online workouts to stay in shape.
However, this is my conclusion: no matter how active and communicative 4xxi employees are now, I can speak for myself that no online communications can replace personal interactions, when you can see emotions, no matter good and bad, of each person.
WHAT’S NEXT?
The biggest impact of remote work from home during the pandemic is that you cannot follow lifestyle that you were used to: you cannot take a walk in the park, you cannot meet your friends at a bar, you cannot walk your dog a distance of more than 100 meters away from your house and some of us cannot spend our time on favorite hobbies. So the impact is on a psychological part of life.
There was little impact on our company’s principals, on how we solve tasks, on how employees are engaged with the company’s life and how their self-development, on finding new projects and recruiting new people, there were only a few adjustments.
The pandemic did not have an impact on the amount of work I have and I did not stop implementing initiatives that I’ve planned to implement.
We’re recruiting new people actively now. There are a lot of plans for the development and education of our employees, implementation of self-development plans, upgrading our skills, and searching for new opportunities. After the quarantine is over, we want to participate as speakers in developers’ conferences, and I mean offline participation.
There are a lot of tasks related to promoting our company’s HR brand both internal and external brands. Of course, there’ll be many meetups and meetings within the whole company so our employees and teams do not feel like they are broken away from the company.
We manage to switch to remote operations, to work from home without any losses in teams’ performance, without failures and without reducing the company’s efficiency due to our well-adjust business processes, mutual respect and assistance within teams and the competence and experience of our employees.
And finally, I’d like to add, the pandemic will end and I hope it’ll end soon. Well now I suggest you fill your life with positive moments and emotions, that can be found in books, sport, movies and tv-series, online communication of all sorts; find positivity in anything that brings you happiness and a good mood given the circumstances.
