Flexibility, culture likely to decide Sri Lanka post-pandemic workforce

Sri Lanka
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COLOMBO – Flexible job hours and a corporate culture that companies have established during a coronavirus pandemic will decide the future direction in a highly challenging post-pandemic revival, Sri Lanka’s human resource experts say.

Intermittent lockdowns since March last year have forced millions of Sri Lankans to work from home – a shift that has been embraced by many companies as a possible long-term solution, allowing cost savings and flexibility for workers.

The situation is the same globally with many companies including multinationals having laid off employees in the face of falling revenues and profits, as consumer purchasing power declined during lockdowns.

Now there is a growing consensus that more staff will in the future be hired remotely, work from home, and have an entirely different set of expectations of their managers.

Companies are now faced with a difficult choice – whether they could sustain their highly talented workforce.

“Working from home means your workforce is definitely a global talent pool. There is no geographic boundary for talent anymore,” Ishan Dantanarayana Group Chief People Officer at Brandix, a Colombo-based apparel maker with overseas operations said.

“Most of them don’t like to work full-time jobs, maybe 8-hour jobs. So, we are talking to hourly, weekly, daily jobs. Or assignment-based or flexi jobs. When this happens you also have to align your rewards and through the rewards your retention, because of the fact that it is a global pool of talent with this emergence of covid.”

He was speaking at an online forum on ‘Managing talent in a post-pandemic in Sri Lanka’ organized by EconomyNext and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.

Dantanarayana’s firm Brandix, which has over 50,000 employees, has already introduced flexible working arrangements for its employees.

“All our processes are to see how do we adjust our processes for the new way of work and that’s where the way we looked at things in the past has to be drastically changed to adapt to this transformation and change,” he said.

A survey for the World Economic Forum among 12,500 employed people in 29 countries found that a majority want flexible working to become the norm. And almost a third (30%) said they would consider looking for another job if they were forced to go back to the office full time.

Unlike in the past, human resource experts say many employees, especially the youth, do not work only for money. Rather, they look for job satisfaction and a better corporate culture they can happily work with.

Chandi Dharmaratne, Vice President, Human Resources at Virtusa, an information technology firm, said the company’s work in the years before the pandemic including creating an appropriate culture is now paying the returns to employees.

“All that happened was with the Covid it accelerated it, and we got the opportunity to truly leverage the decades of work that has been done in building the foundation for employee engagement, connectivity, and digital transformation,” she said

“What should be happening now and what is happening now is using all of that in order to offer the employee even more personalized emotional connect as a result of it.”

The pandemic, which according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ has infected around 199.2 million people and killed more than 4.2 million worldwide as of August 2, has upended industries and workers across the globe.

Hospitality and tourism are among those sectors worst hit by stringent social-distancing rules and travel bans, while sectors that support the work-from-home economy are adding jobs, albeit often in low-wage roles.

About 75% of Sri Lanka’s workforce or 1.5 million employees are facing a high risk of falling into poverty, with 68% in informal employment amid a coronavirus crisis, a survey done by a Colombo-based think tank Institute of Policy Studies showed in November last year.

Some companies have faced a tough time because their high-performing employees have left owing to various reasons amidst practical difficulty in retaining the workforce also due to lack of a conducive culture in companies.

“What I’ve realized during the past 18 months, what actually helped is to retain as well as attract more than hefty paycheques or packages, it has been culture,” said Surani Amarasinghe, Head of Human Resources at Lion Brewery

“Even the millennials are also very, very keen on moving in the careers in those companies that would allow them to experiment and learn.”

-economynext.com

 

 

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