With nearly three decades of leadership experience in delivering innovative and strategic people management practices across multiple industries and geographies, Mr. Jayantha Amarasinghe has earned himself a reputation as an acclaimed and accomplished human resources thought leader with an unrelenting zeal to drive excellence.
He currently serves as the Deputy General Manager of Seylan Bank PLC – a key strategic role in which he performs as the principal architect of human resources strategy and practices of the organization. He has held key HR leadership positions at renowned local and international organizations, successfully driving people-centric strategies and practices to create value and achieve transformational change across diverse business domains.
Since commencing his career at multinational retail giant, Singer Sri Lanka, his unrelenting endeavour for excellence and continuous development propelled him steadily in his professional career, enabling him to move in to Nations Trust Bank before accepting a global HR leadership role at the Doha Bank in Qatar where he oversaw the HR function of four UAE countries, gaining an unmatched knowledge of the inner workings of this global financial enterprise while managing a multicultural and diverse workforce representing 21 nationalities. Upon completing an eventful and enriching stint at this global banking giant, Mr. Amarasinghe returned to Sri Lanka in March 2015 to accept yet another challenging HR leadership role at Seylan Bank.
He is an attorney-at-law, and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Law from the University of Colombo and a Master’s in Business Administration from Buckinghamshire New University – UK. He is a postgraduate diploma holder in Management from the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing and holds the national diploma in Human Resources Management from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management with a merit pass. He also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in International Relations from the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS).
Jayantha Amarasinghe is a Certified Assessor from SHL Group PLC (Singapore) for administering Personality and Psychometric Testing and has been exposed to high-intensity C-Suite Executive Training including ‘Fast Forward Leadership’ by Cerebrus Consultants India; Strategic Human Resource Management from the Bella Vista College of Hyderabad India; ‘Unleashing Creativity for Innovation’ by the Mankidy Associates, Centre for HR Solutions, Pune, India; ‘Leadership and Managing Conflicts by Franklin Covey South Asia;; Strategic Management by the Boston Consulting Group Dubai, General Management by the Qatar Leadership Academy and a diplomatic training course at the Bandaranaike International Diplomatic Training Institute.
Mr. Jayantha Amarasinghe has served in the governing council of the CIPM from 2003 to 2008 and again from 2016 upon his return to Sri Lanka and continues to serve the Institute to date with distinction. HE SERVES AS THE CURRENT PRESIDENT OF THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT OF SRI LANKA .
During his long association with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management Sri Lanka, he has extended his contribution to a number of CIPM’s strategically and operationally critical endeavours, thereby instilling excellence across the Institute while ensuring its growth, sustainability and smooth transition.
In an interview with BMD Jayantha Amarasinghe expressed his views on remodelling the world of work in challenging times.
Excerpts from the interview are given below.
How do you take the lead for the discussion?
The COVID-19 pandemic is taking a tragic toll on human life and impacting public health with massive business disruption. This is resulting in many businesses shutting down or reducing their capacity in markets. Some others have had to rapidly expand service teams and ramp up production to meet increased demands, while many organizations have become remote workplaces overnight.
This has become an unsolidified situation, and businesses have had to adjust and re-adjust periodically. As conditions change HR is needed to play a key role in maintaining business continuity, driving ongoing transformation efforts, and supporting staffing decisions. HR teams are defining the new normal with evidence based HR practices to enable focussed decision-making and organizational responsiveness. HR teams are now at the helm of their company’s crisis management efforts. So, how will these new responsibilities permanently expand the role of HR in the workplace? It all hinges on the needs of employees.
What are the evidence based Practices HR is using to maintain Business Continuity in a crisis?
Maintaining business continuity during a crisis becomes essentially important for continued sustenance. This includes enacting health and safety measures like social distancing protocols to control the spread of the virus, work-at-home policies, and mass onboarding for companies which need to expand their services amidst greater consumer demands such as online delivery. The next phase of business continuity is business recovery, which includes developing solutions to mitigate the COVID-19 impact on employee health and well-being. It also requires action to normalize supply and demand for business recovery from the sudden change in conditions. The final phase of crisis-oriented business continuity is to work within the “New Normal”, adjusting to arising difficult circumstances and conditions.
How will this massive transformation impact the workplace, you, your teams and your organization?
The major transformation in people management will be to introduce new policies, procedures, regulations with modified labour laws to match up to the unprecedented changes. Corporate value chain with training and development are necessary to adopt to the challenges of the “New Normal”. Leaders at all levels and HR practitioners must play a proactive role to prepare to face the ground reality. If the COVID-19 pandemic is not adequately managed globally, it will be difficult to manage business organizations without making radical changes to the current workforce. This situation will result in downsizing, layoffs, closing down unproductive production plants and branches. Workforce planning must focus on a mix of full time, part time and contract employees.
Hybrid work structures, employee risk mitigation, online employee engagement, job based to skill based employment, reduction in generational differences will be inevitable.
HR’s role in the New Normal?
Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, many companies were pursuing organizational transformation to improve agility via digitization for competitive advantage. However, with the emergence of the pandemic and social distancing the concept of transformation changed with urgent new measures being introduced in an effort to redefine normal business operations. HR teams are stepping up and demonstrating their values as business partners, providing data and expertise and outlining the options business leaders need to manage dynamic factors that require agile responses.
In the current context, HR teams are required to identify new strategies and methods to ensure productivity of the remote workforces. In this context, technological resources will play an essentially important role. HR must also protect and care for employees to achieve their support in maximizing productivity in challenging circumstances.
Many large organizations in the world have proactively introduced permanent “Work from Home” (WFH) strategies to energize business operations. As a result, most workplaces have engaged up to a maximum of 50% of the workforce to ensure smooth operations. This strategy has created hybrid work arrangements which will be the future work in the “New Normal”.
Do you have Tips for Making Staffing Decisions in Uncertain Times?
With strategic short term and long term plans, being introduced HR needs to identify critical roles quickly. Depending on the type of business, these critical roles those that drive business priorities in affected areas, jobs directly linked to production or service delivery or customer services. For organizations to achieve operational resilience, HR must review urgently increased operational activity while prudently identifying additional staff requirements to serve as backup teams where absolutely necessary.
Creating role categories to plan for uncertain times:
- Employees who must be available under all circumstances/Core team sector wise.
- Employees who can be in the back up team working from home for a short period.
- Employees who may be given an option to work from home for an extended time or indefinitely.
- Employees who have all the resources to work from home
- Backup teams for any lockdown situation, depending on the criticality of the operation
- Employees who must be mobilized in rosters/ specific work schedules/ special teams
HR has to evaluate whether they have a sufficient number of employees to manage essential duties as conditions evolve and, if not, take steps like cross-training certification or finding temporary or contract personnel to serve as backups. HR has to complete these steps early and make adjustments as conditions demand to ensure positive positioning to ensure success in a crisis.
We need to have a Guide to Working from Home during COVID – 19.
“HR must design a plan to support employees working from home during the pandemic. Our guidance ranges from setting up physical and virtual workplaces to manage the employee time and wellbeing with specific guidelines for managers. Everyone’s experience is different”.
The Guide to Working from Home balances the mechanics of working from home with emotional implications of managing effectively which includes work, home, children and self.
The Future Work is the Future of Worker Wellbeing
All of these are important, but we also need to make worker wellbeing a priority! Today more than ever, the future of work is the future of worker wellbeing. With the growth of the Digital economy, the stresses in managing work-life integration and dealing with the Coronavirus, ensuring workers wellbeing has never been more important. We are accountable to help build our people’s wellbeing and need to define this to include their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being.
Take the Coronavirus as an Opportunity to Re-define Your Business
There is clear evidence now that the coronavirus is an opportunity to re-think assumptions/alternatives for products, services, and business models as well as cross functional groups to be better prepared to manage the pandemic.
I see the Coronavirus as an accelerator for defining the role of organizations, delivery channels, remote working, re-skilling, need based part time hiring, and the transformation of terms and conditions of employment etc.
Will there be demand in Remote Working post COVID-19?
Absolutely, now there is a need. The Coronavirus is making companies, employees and their managers more comfortable with working from home. From now on, face time will no longer be the measure of worker productivity, instead we will finally focus on results! Managers will increasingly explore how to make remote working a part of their culture.
However, there may be some encounters like infrastructure facilities at home, office setup and supplying of laptops, office furniture and mobile data which will assist in some way to help and make working from home as comfortable as possible. But when it comes to looking after mental health and helping staff stay motivated and engaged, HR must work on more creative measures like creating time slots for employees to discuss their thoughts and feelings or seeking guidance from professionals which can make a significant impact. Even though it has been almost a year since we have been working under these conditions, we are still in the learning phase. We have realized that there aren’t any best practices that can define what a remote working environment should look like. It varies from company to company, from person to person, so we pay close attention to the team’s feedback and keep thinking of different methods to make it as comfortable as possible.
HR has to continue creating and refining training policies, and support to remote workers, like establishing a stipend designed to fund home office setups, all while managing cyber security, compliance, and risk. This work requires close collaboration with departments like Finance, and IT to ensure everyone has what they need to successfully work remotely. What’s more, HR will be responsible for figuring out how to keep everyone connected and create a strong company culture in the absence of crowded offices and frequent work-related travel.
What kind of initiatives to be introduced to support the team through the pandemic?
HR and line management collectively need to help everyone in the organization to learn how to adapt. For an example, sharing helpful resources that teach people how to set up their workplace at home to create a healthy, productive environment, educating how to establish healthy routines so that they take regular breaks and create some separation to avoid overworking, and arranging mental health workshops with external mentors to help look after employees’ wellbeing. In this context T&D team could play a major role in executing fundamentals.
It is recommended to organize staff engagement activities and assign special time slots every week dedicated to informal chats among the team. It is important to keep everyone engaged and encourage casual conversation and team building.
It is important to avoid a situation where staff working from home and staff coming to the office are not isolated when we re-open. Employees will of course be free to work wherever they feel most comfortable, but they want to maintain the same cohesion that we enjoyed before the pandemic, so it will be up to us to create a new hybrid culture that leaves no one behind but keeps us all close together.
Focus on reskilling and upskilling employees to prepare them to work remotely:
Even though the lockdown will end soon, preparing our employees to work remotely will become the top priority for the HR function across industries. Moreover, new ways of working will demand new competencies.
Focus on Digitization of people management processes and data:
Today, HR is becoming a pioneer of changes as it ensures the safety of its employees while also supporting the continuity of business and deliverables. Ensuring digitalization of people processes will ensure that the employee life cycle at every stage is managed effectively even in a remote working setup. Managing people remotely, keeping them engaged and motivated and yet maintaining the flow of business is something HR functions will have to include in their agenda.
Build a future-ready workforce by building behavioral competencies like resilience, psychological safety, agility, collaboration among employees:
Apart from functional skills, key behavior competencies need to be built in the workforce to help it cope with today’s challenging times. In the current remote working scenario, competencies like collaborative relationships within teams, with customers have become critical. Building Psychological safety, emotional resilience, and agility in teams are key for employees to survive the crisis. Hence HR functions across industries need to focus on building a future- ready workforce.
Leadership training on managing teams virtually:
Especially when organizations are facing the current pandemic, leadership needs to help their employees to navigate through the new normal. Keeping this in mind, HR will now have to focus more training for the leadership team on managing staff virtually. Preparing them to be open, empathetic and transparent will become very important going forward.
Focus on Employee Safety, Health & Wellness
With the impending uncertainties and lockdown measures gradually getting relaxed, HR will have a major role in taking care of physical wellbeing of employees in terms of their safety as they return to work. More stringent social distancing norms, reduction in the number of employees allowed at one office, safe travel options are few aspects to be looked at.
Also, it is natural for the employees to feel stressed out and emotionally drained during such times. Hence, their mental wellbeing cannot be ignored. Although many companies already started thinking to offer support through resources like employee assistance programs and wellness education campaigns, not all employees know about or utilize these services. It will be the task of HR to boost their visibility through increased communication, and when needed, add or expand certain offerings to ensure both employees and managers have access to the tools and resources they need to take care of themselves and effectively lead their teams.
Engaging employees through effective communication
One of the key communication challenges for HR over the past few months has been coordinating with line management to reach and engage a diverse, distributed workforce. For an example, although software like Zoom and Microsoft teams have enabled better communication among remote workers, and frontline employees, the lack of computers in the work environment has been difficult to keep all the employees in the loop. For this reason, it is imperative that HR utilize data-driven communication tools and systems to better understand our employees and enable more effective, personalized two-way communication with them, no matter where they are located or what their work environment looks like.
Staying on top on new legal and health regulations
With the expansion of remote work, HR has to ensure the organization remains compliant with both existing policies and procedures, like those mandated by the ministry of Health and government authorities as well as new legislation. This is a key priority for HR. In the context of continuous changes in regulations it is crucial for HR to be constantly vigilant and act expeditiously.
Build relationships with frontline employees
The pandemic has made it very clear how essential frontline employees are moving forward. It is imperative that HR build meaningful working relationships with frontline employees to ensure they have everything they need to carry out their job well and be fully supported.
I would suggest the following top 3 policies; organizations are looking at in the New Normal.
Work from Home Policy: Remote working or work from home is here to stay in the post- COVID-19 days as many organizations are starting to see the benefits of lower infrastructure and travel costs for employees. Also the flexibility to work from the comfort of home is both appealing and daunting. Hence companies are updating their work from home policies to accommodate more number of employees working remotely, and to enable them to be productive.
Digitalization and IT Policy: With organizations going virtual, a major emphasis is given on revising the IT policies and digitalizing its processes to help employees with the infrastructure and tools to work remotely. Many organizations are also looking at adding data allowances in the pay structure.
Rewards and Recognition Policy: With employees working virtually, the possibility for them to feel disengaged and demotivated is increasing and also making it difficult to measure their performance virtually. This is leading to a shift in the way performance evaluations are implemented in the COVID-19 crisis. The value of rewards and recognition is increasing in remote working as it will help employees feel heard, included and also improve their engagement. Using technology to have more face to face conversations, giving recognition for positive behaviors and actions and sending appreciation mails are a few ways in which their performance can be recognized. In organizations where unions are functioning it is of paramount importance to commence discussions with their representatives, in view of the pandemic challenges.
The COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate and create the greatest workplace transformations of our lifetime. Thus, our workplaces and our lives will be changed forever.