What challenges do leaders in organizations face post COVID
In this pandemic situation all the organizations are operating in a very uncertain and challenging environment and facing huge ups and downs in every aspect. After the lockdown most organizations are converting to new operational life styles by creating new procedures, processes and mandates to face in times of uncertainty. (Mukherji, 2020)
In this COVID 19 pandemic situation organizations are experiencing
for decreased demand and shrinking of markets (Mukherji, 2020). The main reason
for that is customers are restricted only to purchase the most essential stuff and
not to purchase non-essential goods and services from organizations due to their
decreased income due to loss of employment and salary cut downs. For
organizations, this causes for reduction in their revenue and profits. That is
a major threat to the survival of the organizations. However, if they want to
get rid of this disastrous situation by making profits, the leaders must use
different strategies to reduce the cost of the organization, such as
restructuring, downsizing, hold of new investments, projects, research & development
expenses and holding of new recruitments etc. (Mukherji, 2020). All of these
actions are effective for a short time period and it will be giving long term
side effects to the organizations. If they stop or reduce activities like
research and development during that time, then there will be long term effect
on the organization since research & development is very important to every
organization to move forward. When reducing workforce, organizations will be losing
the trained skilled personnel as well as the goodwill of the organization.
In the new operational lifestyle of the organizations, the
“working from home” concept is initiated. When employees are working from home,
the leaders need to look into the workers’ productivity and the challenges they
are facing in the work at home environment. Many workers are taking the work at
home concept as a blessing because they are enjoying the financial benefits of
reducing time and cost of transportation. However, this work from home concept also has
disadvantages. Leaders may have difficulties in monitoring the work done by
employees effectively when they are working remotely. In the work at home process
workers will automatically increase amount of distraction. Concentration level will
decrease due to family member’s disturbances, noises, poor internet
connectivity, technological issue, old PC etc. At that time leaders may face
problems in gaining expected productivity from the employees. Therefore,
immediate responses for those type of issues should be provided by the
leadership. When the co-workers are remotely working the telecommunication cost
will also be increased but when work at office environment employees can talk
or discuss with each other physically without telecommunication costs. Therefore,
leaders should consider about the additional costs of employees. Another main
challenge to the employees in the work at home process is unlimited workload. That
increases the employees’ stress level and will impact to the mental health. In
that case leaders should capable enough to delegate work through employees in a
way that does not compromise to a dissatisfaction which may cause reducing the
productivity of employees. However, they
have to mainly focus their attention on the productivity as well as employee’s
mental health and motivation when work at home. (Mukherji, 2020)
In the post COVID work life, leaders face uncertainty and
fear as another challenge. Uncertainty of the economy, anxiety of family
members, loss of employment and loss of mental health are some of the examples
that can be happened because of these types of pandemics. As humans, all
search for security and if feel uncertainty
and fear, that increases stress, anxiety and powerlessness. When stress levels
are increased it will lead to a wide range of psychological problems (Harper et al. 2020). Leading of people in a crisis, will be more challenging and that will
need more respect and clear vision. When leaders lead with respect and understanding
,employees feel powerful and certainty. As a summary leader have to motivate
and inspire subordinates during a pandemic situation. However, sometimes leaders
have to make difficult decisions like changing organizational cultures and work
patterns, which have to be carefully planned. If leaders mismanage those decisions,
it will create uncertainty and resistance to the management. (Locklear, J., 2020)
Another challenge to leaders in facing the post COVID pandemic
is technological barriers of the organizations. When lockdowns and travel
restrictions are imposed, it is impossible to have face to face meetings. Then
organizations move out to convene virtual meeting such as zoom, Microsoft Teams
and Google meet. That helps to maintain social distance etiquette. Some leaders have to automate some services
using artificial intelligence and machine learning. That helps to resource
allocations and keeps organizations alive in this problematic time of period. Some
organizations used high speed internet connections such as 5G to control
machinery in the different geographical locations. Low latency network solutions are helpful to organizations
to start their operations remotely. On the other hand, Cyber security is one of
the major threats that leaders should consider during post COVID. As a new lifestyle
people are forced to work remotely. In normal circumstances home networks and
personal laptops do not maintain security practices. Then all data may become
totally vulnerable. Cybercriminals spread viruses using fake domains and
phishing emails. As a summary lack of technology gives more challenges to leaders
of the organization.
The COVID crisis is changing day by day. Leaders have to
face to rapidly changing environment. Then processes and workflows of the
organization need to be changed according to the requirements of the live
environment. In the post COVID environment, leaders have to get more actions according
to short term activities, but those activities may have created impact on long
term business plans. When leaders face rapidly changing environmental issues
due this COVID crisis sometimes the direction of the business may be changed.
The vision, mission and core values of the organization will be affected. Some
organizations may have to change their product range too. When we take a
garment manufacturing organization, they could not conduct their usual garment
manufacturing since orders were cancelled, export of garments were stopped.
However, instead of that they started manufacturing of personal protection
things such as face masks, gloves, medical gowns, aprons and overall etc. which
are essential and have very high demand. Further, many organizations started
remote working environments to face these issues. In short, adjust the
operational activities avoiding harmful effects to core of the organization in
this rapidly changing environment due to COVID, is a big challenge to the
leaders.
Business continuity is one of the major challenges faced by
leaders in service-oriented organizations. Leaders should ensure the continuity
of the business during this pandemic situation and emergency schedules are
essential. Under these circumstances leaders have to identify priorities and
decide what the critical and important services are and what the impact to the
business is if service providing there is break up. Then they should prioritize
the services which should be provided
and allocate required resources needed to continue to provide services without
any disturbances. Further they should prepare organization to face for the
further development of crisis situation and should implement innovative changes
that can be moved to sustainable solutions which can ensure the continuity of
the organization.
As a conclusion all the global organizations and leaders
face this pandemic crisis without any choice. Organizations are not ready for this
kind of fluctuations of the market. Decisions
of the organization’s leaders should be helpful to cross this COVID situation. These
hard situations make a platform to leaders to judge their own decisiveness and
risk-taking abilities. Post COVID, it is very tricky phase of any organization that
need to understand carefully and consolidation be given using organizational strategy,
structure, process and culture. Leaders take decisions without direct effects on
those four dimensions. Modern organization uses flat structure then Leaders have
to interact with teams to get organizational decisions. However, those
situations generate conflict within the organizations (Denis, Lamothe, &
Langley, 2001). In that situation leaders have to go against the preference
then leader need to recognize what is the contravening information that will
come in the discussion with employees. (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010). However,
there is limited knowledge about how to tackle this type of unprecedented challengers
in ongoing crisis (Locklear, J., 2020). Finally, when uncertainty and ambiguity
of crisis organization leader and employees experience emotional situations and
different definitions to organizations events. (Sobral, Carvalho, Lagowska,
Furtado, & Grobman, 2020) leaders need to show empathy towards employees and
show they are concerned about employee’s situations.
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