COVID-19 in Sri Lanka and Seven HRM Related Recommendations against COVID-19

Abstract

Human resource department that performs Human Resource Management (HRM) function in organizations has to play a key role in fighting against coronavirus while ensuring the sound health and safety of its employees and the sound performance of other HRM functions. A conceptual attempt was done to achieve three research objectives which are, 1) to explore about coronavirus disease and its symptoms, 2) investigate COVID-19 situation in Sri Lanka and, 3) to describe seven HRM related recommendations/strategies that can be adopted by an organization under COVID-19 pandemic situation. A comprehensive literature survey was done to achieve the mentioned study objectives. It was found that coronavirus is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus and its symptoms are fever, cough, fatigue, shortness of breath etc. Sri Lanka is still fighting against COVID-19 with various preventive measures to eradicate the virus from the country and many of those preventive measures have been successful so far. In addition, this study found seven HRM related recommendations that can be adopted by an organization under COVID-19 pandemic situation i.e. invest on training employees for remote working, give more consideration for worker wellbeing, introduce pay cuts instead of layoffs, conduct medical tests at the selection process, create employee resource groups, encourage sick employees to stay at home and, communicate all the necessary actions taken by the organization to employees.