How HR innovate in the context of economic recession, mass layoffs

The fact that many businesses in the world and Vietnam have laid off a series of employees recently has raised concerns for workers, especially the human resources (HR) department. They must find a way to balance the goals of business survival, employee morale, and well-being when business performance goes down. Faced with such a situation, in order to manage their work well by implementing the above solutions, what skills should HR need to update?

The phenomenon of massive layoffs, and salary cuts

The phenomenon of massive layoffs, and salary cuts

The year 2023 has begun with news regarding mass layoffs. For example, Bloomberg recently reported on 2023 January 23,  that Spotify suddenly laid off 600 employees. In addition, a series of companies have also intended to cut the number or reduce the salary of employees.

This phenomenon is also present in many technology companies. In early 2023, Amazon was expected to have a huge staff reduction, expected to become the largest workforce reduction in its 28-year history. Large companies such as Meta, Netflix, and Twitter have also had huge staff cuts. For example, Meta has announced a cut of more than 11,000 people, Twitter is also reducing staff globally.

This wave also tended to move to Vietnam, when many companies began to lay off employees to reduce costs for the company. Besides, salaries and bonuses in many fields have also shown signs of significant reduction. A survey by the Ho Chi Minh City Business Association (HUBA) with more than 100 businesses in the city at the beginning of 2023 showed that many units are stopping signing labor contracts in large numbers. HUBA considers this to be unusual compared to previous years. In addition, the number of enterprises with an average salary of over 10 million VND/month decreased from 80% in the second quarter of 2022 to 65% in this quarter. “This is an alarming signal of the labor market, which will face many difficulties in the near future,” said Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Hoa, Chairman of HUBA.

This phenomenon of mass layoffs has had a huge impact on the labor market, especially the human resources department. In such volatile economic conditions, how should human resources be able to adapt and stabilize resources for the business?

Improve HR skills – Improve business quality

As concerns about the economic downturn and layoffs flooded the newspapers, workers were increasingly worried about a precarious working environment and a high risk of job loss. To be able to manage their work well without being affected by the above phenomena, here are some essential skills that employees need to pay attention to updating:

HR needs to improve skills to improve business quality

– Teamwork skills: Teamwork is one of the required skills. As an HR professional, you will have to work and collaborate effectively with colleagues in the HR department as well as with other managers in the organization. To be able to have good coordination, you need to get along with everyone, especially the ability to coordinate in work very smoothly to be able to complete the task excellently.

– Human resource management skills: One of the important skills that an employee should have is the skill of assessing employee capacity. Because only when you properly assess the capabilities of your employees and understand their strengths and weaknesses can you allocate staff effectively. In addition, properly assessing employees’ capabilities will make them feel respected and dedicated to their work.

– Ability to withstand high pressure: With a career in human resources, the amount of work that you have to undertake is relatively large. Every day, you are faced with many tasks, with many different problems. Therefore, in addition to having in-depth professional skills, personnel also need to be able to withstand high work pressure. Otherwise, you can easily get stressed, get bored and give up easily.

– Skills in using technology: In the current 4.0 era, being proficient in the use of technology is a necessity for employees, especially human resources. You don’t have to be an IT expert, but knowing and having the skills to use management tools will help you do your job more efficiently. One of the most comprehensive human resource management systems on the market today, supporting the HR department in performing administrative tasks is Terra HR System.

terra – Efficient solutions for businesses

As a comprehensive human resource management system, terra HR System is the optimal solution for the HR department to support business administration and operations. With outstanding features such as low cost, operating on a single platform, and easy access anytime, anywhere, on both web platforms and mobile applications. terra HR System provides a variety of comprehensive support functions for the human resources department, including timekeeping, salary calculation, personnel data management, leave and overtime, social insurance, recruitment, labor contract motivating, training, and evaluating personnel.

The optimal solution for the human resources department

On the business side, before the signs of an economic downturn, organizations often react and cope with many different solutions, such as freezing recruitment, cutting budgets, and, not updating their knowledge. Knowledge of skills for employees in the company will lead to lower performance, unstable work quality, and high costs, easily leading to a crisis for businesses. Therefore, personnel still need to ensure the instructions and training processes to improve work quality and performance.

“Introducing an effective learning program to upskill employees and develop leadership skills will improve company culture, ensuring retention and development of top performers.” Mr. Greg Brown – CEO of an HR training platform in the US said. Cultivating technology skills has never been superfluous in the current digital transformation era. Therefore, human resources need to actively learn, and look for opportunities to improve knowledge, improve qualifications, and working skills. When these skills are consolidated and guaranteed, the workload of personnel will also be handled more quickly and easily.

As a modern online training system platform, terra Academy – a useful solution of terra comprehensive human resource management solutions group will help businesses overcome the above problems with the lowest fee. terra Academy provides free training courses and implements community projects to support human resources and business administration for terra’s partners and customers as well as students and the human resources community in Vietnam. Based on the knowledge and experience during the process of accompanying businesses, through the training program of terra Academy, corporate employees will be systematized and applied professional knowledge to business operations. professionally and effectively. With the spirit of sharing and developing, terra Academy plays the role of supporting businesses with activities to update knowledge and improve working skills to be able to invest effectively in the Vietnamese market.