This archive report was first published on 22 August 2020.
As the global pandemic continues to unfold, organisations are facing increasingly difficult financial decisions. One key strategy for navigating this crisis is repurposing and retraining the workforce.
By redeploying staff into new areas, organisations can meet critical business priorities while ensuring that critical skills and experience are not lost. This approach can provide resource flexibility and agility to companies managing cost, deepen and enlarge a company's skill inventory, and secure ongoing employment for affected staff.
Repurposing and retraining considerations may involve senior executives and Human Resource (HR) managers reviewing the strategic resourcing requirements of the organisation, ensuring all key roles have comprehensive succession plans in place, and assessing the work being performed.
Organisations that normally operate in highly volatile situations may already be well-versed in repurposing and redeploying their workforce. However, for many other organisations, this quick shift has been incredibly challenging due to the pandemic's impact on their usual stability.
Central to being able to quickly reposition human resources is being able to capture the current level of skills and experience of the workforce. This can be achieved by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) embedded in Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms to run multiple scenarios and assess the potential employee fit and development requirements.
By leveraging these technologies, organisations can deliver targeted training and learning resources, increase time to effectiveness, and provide employees with required learning based on knowledge gaps in their current role and career development plans.
As with any organisational change, change management will need to be carefully considered. Important considerations include employee-related aspects such as location, pay, benefits, work patterns, team structure, performance management, and employee wellbeing.
According to Mike Rob Bothma, Strategic Business Solutions Engineer at Oracle, the implementation of such changes involves capturing significant amounts of documentation, contract changes, approvals, HR data changes, and payroll administration, which will ultimately fall to HR services to manage.
Published on August 22, 2020
