The Covid-19 pandemic has turned into a global health crisis of our time impacting severely our day to day life. With the industry growth rates projected to be the lowest in many years/ decades, Business Continuity from a workforce management perspective will take precedence and Human Resource teams will be required to track, measure and pre-empt what can go wrong in the employee space to minimise the impact on the business.

The pandemic has forced us to look at newer ways of doing things, looking at every activity from a zero based perspective. This is a once in a lifetime learning for this generation and we need to ensure that we preserve this learning and use it even when things start looking positive.

In the ‘New Now’, Human Resource will have to keep a deeper eye on changes in the external environment so as to pre-empt and prepare for these changes in advance. Going forward, there will be immerse focus on remote working, adopting digital ways, questioning past workforce models and resource plans, and we all must utilise the learning from these crises and convert them into opportunities to contribute positively to the business.

For managing the ‘New Now’ and for providing a successful Crisis Response Strategy, Human Resource is expected to track a variety of information beyond what was being tracked before Covid-19 era. In the ‘New Now’, our ways of working will be more agile, more liquid and more flexible. We will have a completely new lens to look at Talent, Roles, Performance Measures, Governance Models and work policies differently. Therefore, it is inevitable that Human Resource Big Data will be more important than ever where additional HR metrics are being demanded and evaluated to manage the ‘New Now’.