Top HR Tips as Covid-19 Impacts Businesses

In these times of uncertainty and unchartered territory, it is vital to keep the long game in mind to ensure your business can navigate through the challenges and come out on the other side intact.

Below are a few tips on doing this:

1. Keep Calm

It is vital in a time of panic and uncertainty, we as employers keep calm and show leadership.

Engaging with your employees and ensuring clear lines of communication is crucial, as things could get more challenging as we enter the anticipated peak of the spread of the virus.

Ensuring you explore your worst case scenarios and try to plan your next best steps is going to help you stay in control, and will guide your employees through this unprecedented situation.

2. Plan Ahead Of Time

There are a number of tools we can use to reduce the financial impact that the current pandemic might bring to your business – however, the best made plans are those formed in advance.

Our advice to all business owners is to consider how the situation will impact them and look at least 3 months into the future. This way, any changes can be phased in a methodical and sensitive manner, as it will impact your employees.

Measures you can implement include:

• Create conditions for successful homeworking
• Reduce the number of hours in your employees’ working week
• Temporarily reduce the working days of your employees

The above vary in their severity, and will depend on the situation you are facing. However, it is advised that you contact us to ensure that whatever steps are taken, you remain compliant with the law and do not fall in danger of any legal ramifications.

3. Look To Adapt With The Long-Term in Mind

Whilst there will be certain measures that you need to take immediately in order to shield against the direct impact of the current situation, this is a good time to map out changes that will help your business in a positive way.

Key questions might be:

• Can we use this situation to create different ways of working to test and measure efficiency?
• Is flexible working a working culture we can adopt in the long run?
• How do we engage better with our employees when we are not with them face-to-face?

4. Embrace Change

Whilst the current world situation is serious, it is also a great time to try new ways of working, and plan for the future, which can create a mindset of change and optimism for the future successes you will go on to see!

5. Stay Vigilant

Most important of all, we must all stay vigilant, caring of each other and responsible in our decision making. As tempting as it is to only see the short term, we need to ensure we consider the consequences of our decisions further down the line.

If you need any assistance or guidance whilst tackling the situation at hand, do not hesitate to drop us a line on [email protected] or call us on 0203 011 0448.