HR professionals have always been in the midst when coming to the handling of human resources. A tough job even in normal times has been rendered difficult now. The situation has become challenging, especially in the IT sector, given the fact that people are working from homes. Time utilization and improving the output of the employees are the two tough jobs that are being handled. The situation gets complicated when the health of employees also has to be taken care of. A fine balance between work and home is being ensured.

The global pandemic has made everyone face unprecedented situations and hence calls for out-of-the-box thinking. With WFH effective in many IT companies, the employees are showing concern over the accumulation of leaves. In normal circumstances employees are paid in cash for leaves that are left unutilized but in present scenario financial strain on the companies would be too much to handle as almost all the employees will have encashable leaves at the end of the year. Special incentives are being given a thought, and we are hopeful that some solution will come out of the deliberations. We are also working on the solutions and are in consultation with multiple stakeholders to ensure that employees and employers should not feel drained out.

However, the HRs engagement and introducing innovative initiatives have made the life of professionals much easier. First, let us start with the basic job advert which is now being done with the help of Augmented writing technology that helps in predicting whether a job advert that a company is writing will get it the intended outcome. The technology uses machine learning and predictive analytics. The software ensures that the job advert reaches out to the right people that fit the description fed by the recruiter. This innovation helps save an organization's cost per application and also reduces the time per hire.

Then we have preselection technology that helps the organizations in selective hiring; a pre-employment assessment software saves the effort that used to go in manually sift through dozens of CVs for initial selection. Another innovation that is helping the HR professionals is the Talent management dashboard (TMD), which gives a comprehensive overview of the talent pool to the recruiter; this helps the recruiters to nurture talent for future.

Talking specifically about India, we can say that the market is growing. The IT companies are already in the technology domain and hence are adopting the tools faster than other industries. Right now, it is easier for the companies that are into software development to understand the ease these innovations bring to the table. The market is picking up, and within a few years, we will see a widespread acceptance across companies operating in various domains

Many companies are also using Cloud-based Human Resource Information System (HRIS) that  have started working on models where they have remote and full-time office employees. The need in the future would be to align the two systems so that they can co-work and co-perform. Though such solutions are in the initial stages, they essentially lead to cost reduction, speedy updates, more flexibility, and hassle free system upgrades.

The mentality that is being faced is the perception that working from home means that an employee can work any hour of the day. Initially, the misplaced perception resulted in fatigue in many employees leading the HR professionals to rein in the trend. Directions were then given out to restrict the working hours and employees were given freedom of choice while ensuring that the work must not suffer.

Many multinational companies are organizing health webinars where renowned dieticians or doctors give tips to the employees on health-related issues. Most of the time, the issues were related to programming the mind to consider home as an office for a specific time and not get distracted. The popularity of webinars and its usage to utilize for employee wellness was the innovation that could have never been thought to be so effective. In the end, things are on the right track, and now a considerable improvement has been witnessed in employee wellness.