In the COVID-19 era, Talent Managers and HR heads are playing a critical role in navigating how companies reinvent themselves and shape personnel practices to build resilience and flexibility while driving productivity. The challenges and responsibilities have been many and unprecedented, extending from fostering connectivity during the various phases of lockdowns, enabling work from home strategies to planning ahead for the imminent return to offices.
At Silah Gulf, the way we work has obviously changed as well and there is no doubt the Pandemic has changed, and will continue to change, the way we work, where we work and how we communicate. Foremost, was the adoption of a “Growth Mindset,” our primary strategy for personal and professional growth of all employees. This entailed a continuous learning program and developing a learning management system to offer the opportunity to our employees to enroll into different e-courses to improve their skills and knowledge on their own time.
Strategy, vision and values have remained the basis of our Employee Journey framework. Employee retention has helped us remain competitive in the Bahrain marketplace. Recognition and appreciation of the high performer, and Progression planning have been effective strategies that have attracted and then, helped retain high-performing employees. A solid financial position and a fair hiring process have surely given us an advantage, but the opportunities for career progression and a continuous training and development strategy have been central to our pandemic and post-pandemic success. Silah’s diverse company culture has attracted the younger job seekers and we have actively used a social media-based recruiting strategy to communicate directly with them.
Silah has also enforced a number of action plans to optimize our employee performance while keeping motivation high in these challenging situations, including working from home. Effective communication and engagement with employees using markers such as Bahraini Woman Day, Labour Day, Mother’s Day with social media competitions to create a motivational and inclusive environment have worked very successfully. The Silah Majlis was created during the holy month of Ramadan and proved to be a great hit amongst the teams. We leveraged the power of technology and digital platforms to acknowledge and motivate employees, thereby also maintaining, and even increasing productivity when working from home was enforced. Our strategy has been simple. Keep employee needs at the forefront of our focus, optimize the use of technology, and imaginative and out-of-the-box approaches for scaling and reimagining pre-Covid policies.