HR departments go into tailspin and doors of opportunities open for freelance consultants on-demand.

Enforced remote work arrangements, even for jobs not suited to it, combined with new rules regarding leave, the remuneration impact of lockdowns and quarantines and heightened focus on employer duty of care have all combined into a perfect storm landing on organisations at the same time.

The general application of certain arrangements and methods became what we refer to as market practice over time, in a slow burn that became our so-called “system”.

Covid-19 up-ended this system and when the dust settles, the world of HR will be changed permanently.

The very nature of employment relationships and propositions will be forever altered and companies must prepare from now so that their respective transitions to the post-pandemic order sets them up for the greatest chances of success.

The most important question to address for companies is:

do we have the right people to help us with our post-pandemic transition to a new world of work?

The answer is, probably NOT. This is no indictment on current HR teams, but rather a function of the traditional employment model.

Most people who have worked for extended periods of time in any company lost their initial freshness of independent perspective a while back, and subsequently fell in line with their company’s way of operating.

The trend to the mean

The self-controlling almost subconscious way in which individuals choose the path of least resistance or general acceptance when approaching change options. Very importantly, this is a self-regulating feature. Nobody tells the reward advisor to go with a proposal beneficial to the CEO, and neither does s/he get anything out of it. The advisor chooses to do so simply because they have fallen in line with the company’s dynamics.

External help is therefore required, but good luck in getting budgets approved for consulting work from the big firms in our post-pandemic world.

Even pre-pandemic, their fees were enough to cause heart palpitations. The answer lies in accessing freelance consultants on-demand, who fit within your budget, do work that is tangible, transfer the requisite skills, and remain available for future follow-ups if needed.

Platforms like One Circle (www.onecirclehr.com) can help you in two ways.

Firstly, their community of freelance consultants on-demand from all over the world, mostly with more than 15 years’ experience, can help you plan your move towards a flexible and agile work program by scoping out a project plan using latest approaches and defining in granularity what needs to be done.

Once you have the blueprint for change, One Circle’s community of freelance consultants on-demand can:

• Use Agile approaches to manage the sequence of events.
• Share practical insights on leveraging freelance consultants instead of human resource management consulting firms.
• Quantify cost savings by developing your company’s flexible and remote organisation policies and strategies.
• Help design or review HR work processes and workflows within a remote work culture.
• Break down business strategy to functional milestones, then cascade these even further into individual roles, so every person knows what is expected in order to deliver the strategy from remote or by using shared talent. The importance of this is paramount, since communication is key within a distributed workforce.

One of the best aspects for you, is that using One Circle’s freelancer consultants on-demand reduces the need for active employee management. This gives you more time to take care of delivering on plans and strategies

Above all, RELAX. Your One Circler has done this before, in a pre-covid world, and can guide you along the process. Rather than treat the impact of the covid-related enforced restrictions as a disruption, look at the inherent opportunities for building long-term structures that can future-proof business.

When you welcome the alternatives of the new system, it can lead to transformational breakthroughs. As the entrepreneur Malcom Forbes said, it’s “the art of thinking independently, together”.