Publications

The survival of healthcare organizations had been a great challenge during the initial days of Covid Pandemic. The challenge was not only in terms of resources like PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), Medicine and other medical supplies but also the fact that healthcare providers were amongst the most vulnerable groups identified for contracting the virus at their workplace. The survival of organizations depends on several factors which can be considered either internal or external. External factors such as pandemics need drastic measures to be put in place in order to alleviate the adverse impact since organizations have no control over them. The COVD-19 pandemic, which engrossed our public and private life since 2020, is entirely different from other disasters and emergencies experienced in the yester decades. The risk of a highly transmittable disease, with no cure and no vaccination, was certainly frightening. Human Resource professionals, tasked with the mission of recruitment, selection, salary negotiation, retention, staff training and development in an organization have the challenge of HR cost under control in an organization. In healthcare scenario, it becomes stressful as highly skilled and expert personnel are extremely short in supply because of their demand in labor market. However, it becomes an uphill mission for the HR professionals to adopt right strategy when an epidemic involving such highly contagious virus spreads in the nation. IJRAR22A1392 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR) www.ijrar.org 95 © 2022 IJRAR January 2022, Volume 9, Issue 1 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) Healthcare organizations and hospitals were challenged with delivering healthcare to the sick and infected patients by employees those who themselves were extremely vulnerable to contract infection or carry back the virus to their family members. The stress and pressure of the healthcare workers were unprecedented. Many were persuaded by their family members to give up their job either to stay safe from the virus or were terminated by their employers in order to balance the HR cost at the time of minimal income. On one hand chronic patients were extremely sacred of coming to the hospitals for their regular follow-up, on the other hand patients with acute syndrome after getting affected with the virus were being brought to hospitals where not enough medical facilities were available. Lack of regular patient flow severely impacted many small to large scale hospitals in terms of their revenue. The healthcare organizations were also challenged with inadequate and reluctant workforce to treat the patients suffering from the highly contagious disease. The government also enforced that the private hospitals keep aside their physical and human resources for treating patients suffering from the viral attack. Our survey of literature was done with the key words ‘Preferred HR strategies to combat COVID 19,’ ‘HR strategies of hospitals in response to COVID-19,’ ‘HR management during the pandemic’ ‘Most common HR strategies during COVID-19.’ The sources surfed are BioMed Central, PubMed, ProQuest, Springer, and Google scholar. Around fifty articles were shortlisted as they were in line with the objectives of our study. Nine out of the fifty were very much in line with our variables and they were taken for deeper analysis. Industrial and service organizations have adopted several strategies to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on their productivity. A few such identified ones include innovative working style sought after, focusing on work schedule, assignments, and communication by allowing flex-time opportunities and creativity to their employees (Gigauri, 2020a). They have permitted remote work, reduced work hours, cancelled or postponed business trips, arranged online training and staff development activities, reduced or ban recruitment (Gigauri, 2020b). However, most policies and practices had been made for managing people at the workplace. But the novel Coronavirus pandemic has challenged the HR strategies, and employees were permitted to work from home. Such policies and practices have its own pros and cons, not fitting to all the employees, facing big challenges such as staying at home while kids are at home when schools are shut down (Al-Mala, 2020). Healthcare organization could not rely on the above said strategies for reasons obvious. The first reaction for many healthcare organizations was not to ramp up hiring but to reassign the staff on hand (Rice, 2021). On the other hand, the most HR strategies followed are dismissals, cut in salaries, and granting unpaid leaves which have led to the organizations' changed attitudes (Gigauri, 2020c). The other common practices found in the healthcare sectors are holding back the health workers for a month or more in the hospitals, and their work time was scheduled for 24/7. The most common themes followed in the study settings of the above said articles are: laying off employees, reducing employees' working hours, temporarily converting employees’ full-time jobs to part-time and re-training employees to use alternative means of doing business.

The overall management of Covid situation was rated by the hospitals themselves as excellent and average at almost equal proportion. Almost half of them had difficulty in managing the hospital during Covid first wave. At the trying time of the pandemic, the hospitals did not accept downsizing strategy by reducing the number of hospital beds for Covid patients, because it could have detrimentally affected the management of Covid-situation. Vast majority of the rated their HR management was very challenging job. We also found that among the participating hospitals, almost half of them adopted pay cut to top management. But pay cut to the middle level employees was comparatively low among the rural hospitals. Majority of the hospitals did not use pay cut to the lower-level staff as a coping strategy in the pandemic situation. Most of the hospitals supported their staff by providing accommodation on campus and counselling support to reduce their stress. Covid has been accepted fully by the rural hospitals as the new normal while more than ten percent of the urban hospitals are yet to accept the same.