As the current pandemic challenge continues, I am hearing from various clients on how their team members are being highly productive managing family, pets and elderly.  When I hear these stories like this, it really inspires me and gives me lot of hope. From the history books, I also learnt that Isaac Newton worked towards theories of gravity while stuck at home during the plague pandemic!

We looked at the type of requests that are coming in to Draup post Covid19 crisis and have come up with top things HR can do during this time.  This is a summary of mining over 100 requests across 60 clients.

1. Establish Learning Academies:  Learning academies across key competencies are going to be very critical.  Cybersecurity for example is going to be a very critical skill and there are lot of support roles in Cybersecurity to which existing employees can transition into.
2. Expand Traditional Geo Focus for Recruitment:  Now is the key opportunity for enterprise to target innovative technical talent.  Several startups are potential targets to get great talent.  As work from home is here to stay, we should rework the traditional geographical boundaries.
3. Relook at the Job Descriptions:  This is a great time to relook at the Job Description and conduct some benchmarking studies to see how the levels you have modeled match against bleeding edge companies.
4. Soft Skills Competencies: Refining and modeling Soft Skills through text mining will be a great opportunity for  learning new tools and as well as creating impact.  Your team member passionate to learn new things can work with our team and do it themselves. 
5. Learning Journeys: Develop detailed journeys with respect to pushing employees to next emerging roles (technology and digital enabled corporate function roles)
6. Develop 3 year HR Roadmap:  Communication, Employee Wellness, Reskilling, Employee engagement, Targeted tech hiring and labor trends are the requests we are getting.  So assembling a powerful blue print to handle all the scenarios will be extremely critical.
7. Manager Learning Models:  Having a very strong middle management is going to be the key.  Training them on human psychology,  communication and presentations is going to be very crucial

We have started doing several experiments and fielding quite a few questions on various soft skills and competencies.  Many companies are beginning to understand the need and the value of soft skills in excelling in a job.  We recently looked at Google and Microsoft to see what are the differentiating Soft Skills they are emphasizing.  In a role like Product Manager for example, Microsoft emphasizes in skills like Embracing Change, Working Autonomously while Google Emphasizes Strategic Thinking and Complex Idea Communication.  So by looking at the soft skills alone, we can judge the evolution and maturity of Product Manager roles across the companies.  We are developing systemic models on this and are very excited to take this forward

Now that all of us are working from home, we are getting several research requests around online gamification of employee engagement tools.  Our initial research shows that there is no one platform that handles it all.  The needs are across Training, Performance and Communication.  What we have found is it is a collection of instruments that is very effective rather than one platform

• Amplified number of 1:1s with employees and HR and Managers
• Pushing emails about key values and dos and don’ts
• Quick pulse surveys and polls (short format)
• Digital onboarding
• Function specific platforms like Big Game Hunter in salesforce
• Regular leadership communication
• Using video feature in communication tools like WebEx and Microsoft teams

We are creating very interesting models around plotting learning journeys.  The goal is to generate defined models of specific transitions that you can use in your employee communication.  Here we have shown the journey of a call center agent becoming a  Digital Marketing person.

Several new skills are emerging like Complex Procurement Roles, FP&A roles, Cybersecurity roles, Animation for employee communication all becoming critical post Covid.  We are coming up with a feature called Skills Move Balance Sheet.  Using this, you will very soon be able to model a transition  and get an output on what new digital initiatives that the company can undertake (very specific to your industry) and the tools that your enterprise can use.This is a very innovative widget that can help you in board room discussions