Employee Engagement: Probable Solutions to Challenges Posed by Covid-19 Outbreak with reference to Indian IT Sector

Abstract

The last year have been really tough on the global socio and economic changes because on contemporary covid-19 outbreak. The lot has changed in terms of how employee and employer engage themselves at workplace. This change was triggered due to penetration of technology across the all industrial sector and around globe. The past few months of COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in companies’ laying-off employees, remote working, work-life imbalance and in general increased employability uncertainty especially among IT employees. This has brought organizational focus back to their employee engagement tactics and motivation as employee morale has touched an all-time low. Though the concept of employee engagement first appeared in an academic journal in 1990’s, it remained to be a matter of constant revival. The present study is based on secondary data sources such as review of various research papers from substantial online sources, articles, books, blogs and reports. In this paper efforts were made to study the recent trend of employee engagement in the ongoing covid-19 outbreak. It was observed that areas of employee engagement changed dramatically during the crisis, like: Leadership and Communication, Compensation and Benefits, Health, Wellbeing and Balance. Finally the paper draws attention to challenges posed viz. how to ensure business continuity for customers and how to ensure safety of their own staff. The reasons could be Lack of clarity, trust on employer, decline in spending on IT projects by companies in the U.S. and elsewhere, digital transformation, historic rise in unemployment level, amplified use of artificial intelligence and many more. Efforts were made to identify the probable solution and best practices followed to resolve them. Such study will act as a supportive hand for any organization in building effective employee engagement strategies in this trying situation. Organizations can reengineer their current employee engagement strategies and policies.