The global pandemic has taught us many valuable gifts of survival with minimum resources. While working professionals are dealing with dynamics of work from home and managing family responsibilities, children are struggling to gain education through online resources (not limited to school anymore). Technological leverage made lives easier along with few challenges of Eyesight issues, stress, anxiety and addiction to mobile (especially children).

With the world slowly opening up, employees are still going through the uncertainty of what next. At the same time, organizations are figuring out best ways to have smooth return-to-office and to engage employees. Here are few challenges organizations are facing

• Engage current employees

While employees are happy to be in office, few are still working from home. Organizations are figuring out ways to engage employees to enhance productivity with additional challenges of team motivation and building culture of shared vision.

• Changing aspiration of employees

Since markets have opened up, there are aggressive players with new competitive offers for unique and niche talents. At the same time, many companies have not been able to maintain the appraisal cycle or salary correction like before. This has led to changing aspirations of existing employees. This aspiration also demands unique ways to acquire new talent without compromising the engagement of existing ones.

• Changing definition of leadership

Many organizations are struggling with leadership dynamics. Many companies think a great leader at the executive level is enough to survive a crisis, but as layoffs mount, teams shrink and uncertainty becomes the norm, people need better leaders throughout the entire organization.

What to do?

While there are many insights, tools available to cope up with the challenges, “clarity” has been proven one of the best ways to not only manage but deal at root cause level. Let’s put some context to this word “clarity” in order to truly understand how it helps to identify challenges and address them

• Clarity of the situation in hand

Uncertainty is the most frequently used term especially at the stage where companies have opened up for its operations. What’s required is to have an absolute clarity w.r.t how we can catch up with the impact and build future ready culture in spite of the current uncertainties. Conducting focused groups around this will narrow down immediate things to be dealt with.

• Clarity of the term “leadership”

Leadership isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to every situation. Organizations needs to have a deeper awareness of how to redefine leadership based on clarity of the situation. A classic mix of traditional and modern leadership approach would prove a great deal of help.

• Clarity in communication (at all levels)

Significance of communicating goal and role at all levels has become increasingly important now. Apart from defining and communicating, having open and regular conversations w.r.t. mental health issues, performance issues or any other issues, becomes a valuable way to minimize future risks and resolve the issue while still it’s at manageable size (if any)

• Clarity on right resources

You cannot have “know it all” person to deal with challenges of different context and depth. It’s wise and recommended to invest and hire professionals for each cluster of challenge . Hiring a subject matter experts, life and executive coaches, HR consultants will definitively help to get the diagnostics and resolution done much faster and better.

Having clarity at all these levels have proved a helping aid to proactively resolve organizational challenges in these uncertain times.

Author

Supriya Pujari