Abans Group Puts Business And
Stakeholders At The Centre, Not Covid-19
The sudden shift in work culture following the Covid 19 pandemic since early 2020 has brought new challenges for the human resource managers around the globe. Many organisations were not ready with a fall back plan as far as the HR practices are concerned at the time the pandemic hit the nations. Job cuts, and curtailing employee benefits were inevitable as the lockdowns were imposed.
The Abans Group too had to go through these initial setbacks.
The company’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Dulani Nissanka says, they learned quickly and brought in the best HR practices to manage the situation.
“Today it is the business and its stakeholders which is at the center and not really COVID-19,”she adds.
Dulani Nissanka spearheads the Abans Group’s Human Resources function as the Group Chief Human Resources Officer. In this position she facilitates the organization’s human resources (HR) development strategy which equally benefits the employees, the management and thereby enhance lives of the Sri Lankan community.
The company’s HR strategy is based on globally acclaimed HR practices which supports in building talent, leadership, whilst enabling the organization to redefine its culture and be ready for the future while maintaining its core value system.
In this interview Ms Nissanka describes the HR challenges they had to face with the pandemic and how they found sound solutions to manage the company by befitting employees, customers and the stakeholders.
Initial challenges
“At the beginning it was a panic situation; it was chaotic and soon it became a learning process for everyone. As we matured, within a few months, we learned to continue with more or less business as usual amidst the pandemic.”
“Today we run most of our projects as planned, may be the scalability could differ, may be the mode we operate could differ, but what is important is that unlike the last year it is the business and its stakeholders which is at the centre now and not really the COVID-19. We choose the projects based on the business priorities and empowered our teams for implementation. This is very crucial, as we do not know how long this crisis will last, and we will have to peer through the fog of uncertainty for quite sometime.”
The Pandemic
Last year when the pandemic hit, there was no playbook that we could follow or to guide us on how to deal with this global crisis, but everyone was expecting HR to adapt fast and guide the teams to adjust to the new reality. Our focus was to ensure the safety of our employees & our customers and business continuity at that point. In the group we have about 15,000 employees working across multiple geographies around the island and most of them are front line staff, who are not privileged to work from home. HR’s priority was to ensure the safety of our staff. As initial measures we provided the required safety measures whilst implementing the Risk Control Policy which was our guidebook in managing the threat of COVID-19 at the workplace which incorporated all the health and safety measures. At the inception, creating awareness among this large workforce who are at varied level of comprehension was one of the biggest challenges HR business partners were faced with.
Safety of employees
Wherever possible our frontline services such as retail sales, collections were catered through digital platforms reducing the risk for both our staff and customers. The remote working model was adopted for the support staff who could work from home, backed by the required IT infrastructure. In our organization it was a fusion of work models that we adopted as certain people were working at site whilst some were remotely working, and some were working from the office on the work requirements and their personal situations.
Main challenges in HR sphere
As we move forward in the new normal employee wellbeing, engagement and learning sphere became the most challenging for HR.
Employee wellbeing, being part of our Employee Value Proposition has been one of the focused areas during the pandemic as employees have been affected in varied ways, could be mentally, emotionally, physically, or financially. To support our teams during the pandemic, wellness programs have been launched to help employees to augment their wellbeing and mental health, assisting them to maintain a stable and balanced life. We’ve being able to quickly move on to virtual learning platforms to facilitate our capability development interventions via online. We will continue to use technology for workforce learning and employee reskilling, particularly for a company with such a geographical spread, enabling us to reach employees across the country. It also provides us with data which can make the learning function more effective in future which will help us in aligning the learning strategy to our business better. We are driving the company more towards a self-driven talent development strategy where employees will be made responsible for their own development in time to come.
With the distractions in the normal work-life, where businesses started operating in hybrid model, at-site, at-home, in office, collaboration and engagement became a huge challenge. Further keeping up with the regulations we are not being able to bring teams together, nor being able to rollout our employee relations calendar, which previously helped our teams to collaborate, recharge and reconnect. Hence during the last year, we have shifted most of our employee relation activities to online initiatives and social media platforms, whilst we continued with the usual onsite engagement activities following the safety precautions wherever possible.
Moving forward with the Pandemic
When the Pandemic hit all the projects that we had launched at the beginning of the 2020/21 financial year, went on the backburner as the COVID-19 pandemic took centre stage and became everyone’s immediate priority. But we choose the projects based on the business priorities and empowered our teams for implementation. This is very crucial, as we do not know how long this crisis will last, and we will have to peer through the fog of uncertainty for quite sometime.
Whilst managing COVID-19 during the year group also focused on areas such as digitization, innovation, customer centricity, succession planning, and culture, as it was crucial for the organization to evolve to the next level. Leadership has been encouraging the teams to embrace technology in different verticals wherever we could bring efficiencies and we have multiple projects ongoing at present. In the HR technology and digitization was utilized in the verticals of learning, communication, and engagement.
We have started driving towards a culture of innovation, both disruptive and incremental by promoting new thinking, new ideas, new concepts which can be converted into processors and practices which were heavily promoted within the organization since last year. With our vision “To keep empowering people with a better way to life” our customers remain at the center. We have launched the ‘Service Culture’ concept as we leverage customer service as a vital corporate strategy with the intention of augmenting our service levels at each touch point. The succession planning program themed ‘Next Leader’ and the Talent Management Framework were launched in the year 2020 amidst the COVID challenges to strengthen the leadership pipeline. As we transform the organization to become Bigger Better and Bolder, we are consciously transforming our organization’s culture to make it more collaborative, futuristic, agile whilst preserving our core values. These areas have been our people related priorities based on the business needs, which helped the company to move forward, and the Group overall performed extremely well compared to the previous financial year.
Future
Though its currently unpredictable, HR leaders will have a key role in getting their organizations ready for the next normal, for post COVID, as its highly unlikely, the organizations will return to previous forms of behaviors or practices. Instead the organizations should be ready to embrace the next normal.
In the next normal, based on the industry, we will have to choose a work model that fits well.
We will be working on a hybrid model combining remote working and regular office presence so that our teams can get the best of both as pure remote work for all employees may not be sustainable for our business. As our team will gain digital maturity, we will continue to embrace technology in different spheres to enhance efficiencies and bring about convenience to our stakeholders.
Role of HR has evolved to a different level with COVID-19. Ever evolving talent requirements, managing employee experience, remote collaboration, ensuring wellbeing of a diverse workforce are some challenges organizations will have to rethink in the next normal. In future we need to bring in resilience and flexibility in the HR function, so that we could adapt faster to support the business in any challenging situation.
In a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, most organizations are focusing on “how your company will make it out alive?” but I think if the organizations should be responsible enough to take care of the stakeholders at this point, be it the customers, employees, the community, the rest will fall in place. As HR leaders our mandate is to help organizations to align in that spirit, so I see the future is going to be very challenging but very exciting for the whole HR community.BMD