The Influence of Covid – 19 on Virtual Employee Management Practices by Organisations: An Empirical Study

Abstract

In the mid of 2020, the COVID– 19 disease began rapidly disrupting lives, economies, and workplaces and continues to do so. It was when the disease was brought in a global debacle it forced the world to go into complete lockdown with strict government guidelines of social distancing. The pandemic resulted in the loss of jobs and high rate of unemployment. The COVID – 19 plagues forced organizations to make rigorous changes to the workplace leading to complete chaos to employee and employer experience. One of the most drastic changes was “Work from Home”. The human resource management department was forced to come up with new strategies to face the challenges of remote working. Scholars including Snell et al. (2002) and Ulrich et al. (2017) have argued the relevance of a strategic HR approach during such challenging times as essential in ensuring institutional competitiveness. Accordingly, institutions turned their attention to virtual employee management (VEM) as an alternative to the traditional system of employment management. According to Henderson et al. (2016), at the time, the adoption of Virtual Employee Management becomes mandatory to facilitate collaboration across isolated employees and stakeholders. Virtual Employee Management is co-dependent groups who work from the comfort of their places with the help of virtual tools or apps like Zoom, Skype and Google meet to communicate work. The major responsibility lies in making productive ‘remote teams’ a crucial challenge for human resource managers. A survey was conducted on 50 employees and lecturers from esteemed universities by providing them a questionnaire. Remote team leaders’ constant hurdles were managing projects, lack of team communication technology issues at home, geographical and cultural barriers. The virtual employee faced core challenges such as overworking after work, maximizing productivity, overcoming distractions and staying motivated. This paper is an empirical paper presenting the problems being faced in virtual employee management by the influence of COVID -19 in general and provides strategies to overcome them to face this epidemic.