Adapting Employee Performance Management in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has created a particularly challenging environment for human resource management (HRM)—with managers having to quickly venture into the “unknown unknowns” as they strive to help their workforce adapt to and cope with radical changes occurring in the work environment. Overnight, the entire world found itself faced with what is termed as ‘the new normal’ and the workplace is not an exception. These instant changes have since introduced new dynamics into the workspace, both to the core business deliverables and to the employees’ way of work. It is the advent of the Covid-19 that has brought about concepts like social distancing, working from home, hybrid work or cohort shifting in the workplace. All these have created a huge impact on the employee performance management. Relying on secondary sources, this paper explores the impact of Covid-19 on employee performance management and the adaptations by organizations to adapt to a new order of work. The study found that the full practices of employee performance management were abruptly discontinued by various organizations overnight, with the justification of preserving the future of companies. The implication is that many organizations are underutilizing the benefits offered by performance management as they are not implementing state-of-the-art employee performance management systems, nor are they placing value on this HR process. It is recommended that employers should redefine expectations on the delivery of objectives by employees and review and update performance objectives more frequently than usual, as the organization takes a different path and strategic focus. They should also use multisource feedback systems.