Ways to leverage technology for business continuity in case of 4th Covid Relapse

The COVID-19 pandemic has already impacted global economies, posing significant operational, structural, and management challenges to business dynamics. In terms of pandemic readiness, traditional resilience planning falls short. The interruptions caused by pandemic occurrences are vastly different from those caused by technological or operational breakdowns. They are big in size, intensity, and duration, requiring businesses to go above and beyond traditional resilience planning strategies.

Businesses must embrace pandemic preparedness to provide a comprehensive response and assure continuity. Here are five ways how technology can indicate the way forward.

1. Employee Security

Employees cannot be productive if they are concerned about their own or their families' safety. As a result, during a pandemic, an employer's first focus should be employee safety, security, and wellbeing. Businesses can effectively combat health concerns by implementing proper technical solutions. Attendance devices with face recognition and temperature monitoring are excellent examples of HR technology for detecting sick employees, preventing them from tiring themselves by working while sick, and protecting other employees from infection. Such methods force you to be proactive in order to reduce future disruptions.

2. Health Technology

With the advent of health technology, firms may now measure and protect employee health in more complex ways. Connected wearable devices, for example, can check employees' oxygen levels, heart rates, blood pressure, and a variety of other health-related data points in real-time to assess their physical and mental well-being. Employees can punch their attendance using smartwatches, protecting them from handling potentially contaminated traditional biometric devices.

3. Telehealth

Telehealth has also grown in popularity as a result of the pandemic. According to studies, telehealth use has surged 38X since the pre-COVID-19 baseline. This is because individuals opted to avoid hospitals owing to the risk of infection. However, not every employee is technologically adept enough to locate doctors online, interact with them, and make digital payments. This is where corporations may play an important role in assisting their employees. They may integrate telehealth into their HCM solutions so that employees can connect with doctors online with a simple click. They should use their Learning Management Systems to easily train their personnel on how to use integrated telehealth. Integration of consulting fees with their Benefits Management Systems helps make the entire consultation process more simple.

4. Agile development and information technology infrastructure

The IT department must become more agile if the business is to benefit. This necessitates far more than simply transitioning development teams to agile product models. Agile IT also refers to the process of bringing agility to IT infrastructure and operations by transitioning infrastructure and security teams from reactive, "ticket-driven" operations to proactive models in which scrum teams develop secure application programming interfaces (APIs) that service businesses and developers can use.

5. Recruitment of Employees

Changes in demand, such as the lack of a solid labour forecasting mechanism in place during the COVID-19 crisis, resulted in a brief surge in hiring, followed by large layoffs as things began to return to normal. To address current and future challenges, such as employee engagement and retention, another wave will almost certainly necessitate a complete rethinking of talent acquisition techniques. A proper HCM technology can more accurately forecast a business's future requirements and make the right hiring decisions, which is a win-win for both the employee experience and the organization's requirements.

Conclusion

The next COVID-19 wave offers major economic dangers. Fortunately, after two years of dealing with the pandemic, we are more prepared. To meet the demands of a pandemic, HR technology has improved swiftly. Businesses merely need to be aware of the available technological solutions and be ready to act quickly.

Authored By: Sumit Sabharwal, CEO of TeamLease HRtech