Mr. Deepak Patil has over 30 years of experience in HR, Personnel, Training and Organisational development. He has worked with companies such as Raymond, Indokem and Goldstar in India and with Texmaco in Indonesia at several leadership positions including Group General Manager HRD, Senior General Manager HR and Head Human Resources. Mr. Patil is passionate about enabling fast growing ‘family-run’ businesses transform to ‘professionally-managed’ ones. He holds a MBA in Marketing and HR.
Here are his key experiences in the industry in relation to the current COVID-19 pandemic and WFH situation.
What is the impact on employee performance in the pandemic situation?
We are strategic Business HR Consultant, and we help family run businesses to take their organisation to the next level of performance .
Our foremost challenges during the starting phase of Covid-19 Pandemic was how to get the client’s organisation ready to withstand the new reality. It was like an elephant, and six blind persons, where each one was touching the different organs of the elephant and describing the elephant. Similarly, employees were impacted by pandemic in different ways such as financially, socially, formal and informal work style which was not so good work from home environment. All these impacts were contributing to the performance of employees and therefore one common solution was not applicable to every one .
Have you taken any proactive measures to maintain employee performance?
As explained earlier, there was no standard solution available. We therefore had to understand various categories of impact and then offer the solution to our clients
Broadly these categories were:
1. Advise to minimise the financial impact through offering the solutions which are a win-win to both the employers and the employees
2 To facilitate the on-boarding online platform for work from home environment
3. To bring day to day clarity on work from home by bringing clarity on daily activities, monitoring and reporting
4 Small group interaction and giving clarity on important and sensitive issues
All these measures brought desired impact on maintaining performance for work from home categories of employees.
Will there be any changes to existing appraisal methods? Process & Frequency?
Some of our clients were not able to complete the annual performance evaluation exercises for the earlier financial year 2019 -20. We therefore advised our clients to not to mix earlier year exercise with Covid-19 affected period. The earlier year was done with the parameters set at the beginning of financial year 2019 -20. The parameters for the current financial year 2020-21 was set for work for home scenarios.
Do you think formalizing feedback and/or regular performance check-ins will make a difference?
Both measures are of paramount importance for both scenarios namely work from Home or, work from remote locations and work from office . Since physical interaction is difficult, formalising feedback and regularising feedback is must .
With employees and managers all away from each other, what steps are being taken to ensure clarity on work objectives/goals and their priorities?
We use a simple but effective methodology of using HOW WHEN WHAT WHERE . Using these words you get clarity and are able to move from intangible to tangible.