Human Resource Outlook in Recession

Recession in IT Industry is a big problem especially in India as it is the land of IT outsourcing and a lot of large western companies outsource their IT services to Indian companies. So, it is obvious that the supply of works for Indian IT companies has suffered in the current scenario.

A recession is a contraction phase of the business cycle where significant decline in economic activity lasts more than a few months, which is normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. During the recessionary phase following phenomenon was observable-

• Lending Rates increased because of Liquidity Crunch and lending rules became stringent ;ODs were discouraged

• Government Interference in form of Pumping money into the economies to get the interest rate lower to the normal level so that people start borrowing and businesses start growing

• The result was massive economic crunch which led to cutting down of outsourcing, heavy layoffs, and application of cost cutting strategies

As a Human Resource Manager, I will undertake following steps to contain the situation in my organization-

• Determine the requirement level in the organization keeping recession in mind.

• To extract the best from the available resources.

• Increase in HR connectivity with employees

• Counseling sessions

• Mentoring Session

• Trainings to be continued for improvising upon the employee skills

• Flexi leave Program

• Compressed work hours

• Work From Home facility

• Job sharing

• Loaning of employees

• Ask employees to help in corporate development activities

• Focus to be increased on Culture development, improvement in quality of appraisals, improvement in internal communication system

• Engage people well especially the HIPOs(give them enough authority, decision making power)

• Planning, restructuring of the organization, exploring opportunities to add value to business, succession planning, Research and development...