The COVID-19 pandemic has created shockwaves across the globe and impacted businesses and economies. Enormous disruptive transformations have happened in the work models and systems to enable businesses to flexibly operate, sustain, and remain agile in uncertain times. The future of work, which seemed uncertain post-pandemic, has reached normalcy due to the organisational resilience and strategic responses shown by organisational leaders and small businesses. Although small businesses across the world have been impacted negatively leading to closures, financial crunches, and job losses worldwide, many have shown signs of resilience and recovery. The chapter throws light on the work transformations across economies and strategic responses to deal with them. It describes the challenges faced by various small businesses and the way they have been flexible and resilient. The chapter proposes a framework for building an inclusive economy that has been asserted to be the solution to a sustainable and resilient future in times of uncertainties and crises.
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The worldwide contingency triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic has created shock waves across business organisations and entrepreneurial ventures, disbalancing their momentum and survival status. The pandemic has caused disruptions in the organizations worldwide leading to innovative and inclusive business models. Lesson imparted is that transformations can happen overnight. Digital transformations, innovations, high customer value, operational scalability, and automation application are the crucial areas where responsive actions have been taken and yet need to be implemented for sustainable businesses. Organisations and HR leaders are now accelerating actions and reinventing the flexibility and sustainability value of the post-pandemic human and digital interventions. Workforce interventions focussing on work resilience, crisis management, enterprise dexterity, and hybrid work model are rapidly re-inventing HR environment and business models. The current situation is palpable and the effect of the epidemic will be on-going. Small and medium businesses worldwide are also taking their call for sustainability by measuring the risk assessment and formulating the strategies to act accordingly.
The COVID-19 crisis disarrayed labour markets globally during 2020. Gartner (2021) discussed the future of work HR dynamics that would be followed post-covid, such as an increase in remote working organisations, change towards remote work model as well as discovering the critical capabilities of workforce and cooperate digitally to be prepared to change new workforce experience tactics. According to survey results, 16 percent of companies use technology to monitor their employees more regularly such as virtual clocking, tracking work computer usage, and monitoring employee emails or internal communications/chat. The trend towards expanding contingent workers and introducing other job models like substituting regular employees with temporary ones as a cost-cutting measure is more popular now than ever before. Employers' roles have evolved from societal safety nets to personal elements and support services such as increased sick leave, financial support, changed operating hours, and child care arrangements. Employees were encouraged to gain essential talent that might offer many opportunities for their professional advancement when critical skills and responsibilities were separated. The concept of (De-)Humanization of employees referring to creating a culture of inclusiveness is now much needed to achieve long term sustainability. The considerable shrink in the work categories mandating an inclusive economy by reimagining work, the workforce, and the workplace through focus on specialized tasks and responsibilities and applying work-automation for higher employee engagement can show a foremost role in shaping the future of work in the post-covid era. A three-phased strategy bringing together technical proficiency, adaptive methods and attitudes, and community engagement to alter adverse changing aspects in complex environments for future work has to be focused upon for inclusive growth. The pandemic has taught that human skill is not replaceable even with the adoption of technologies. Hence, it is important to empower employees by providing flexible work hours, a hybrid work model, and renowned welfare policies. Work from anywhere, hybrid work model and flexible working will increase the productivity of employees’ post-pandemic.
The disruptive innovations in future of work models and systems are also simultaneously accompanied by strategic responses of small business enterprises that have been struggling hard during crisis to sustain and survive. Small businesses are the backbone of any economy and their sustainability is a major concern for global economies. These small entrepreneurial ventures face immense resource and labour shortage, finance limitations, production and supply chain hurdles during the pandemic crisis. Thus, they also need to accelerate their concentration on the local communities by understanding their needs and working with them to provide a solution that will help them sustain. Several measures have been taken by the governments of various economies to support and promote the small businesses and prevent them from insolvency amidst the pandemic crisis.