BOC ensures safe environment for staff | Sunday Observer

BOC ensures safe environment for staff

21 February, 2021
 K.E.D. Sumanasiri
K.E.D. Sumanasiri

In managing the early part of the pandemic, the Bank of Ceylon’s (BOC) HR function proactively engaged all employees, drawing on a novel method of delegation, seeing that it would be the most effective and efficient way forward in handling an unprecedented situation posing similarly unseen challenges.

To mobilize a team exceeding 8,000 staff members in the initial months of the global pandemic, required the bank’s HR department to give trust and confidence, to all employees across the organization, in their capabilities and decision-making power.

BOC adopted a two-tiered strategy, where the primary objective included the protection of all employees, and secondly ensuring business would go on as normal even with the restrictions. Therein, employee adherence to all Health Department enforced regulations and orders remained a key HR goal, complemented by its own initiatives to drive employee safety and continuity of operations.

Accounting for the many impacts of COVID-19 on the bank’s HRM function, BOC has adopted numerous changes in its delivery of HR services including digitalization. BOC has afforded much focus to ensuring a strong work-life balance for employees, in line with the increased need for work-from-home and flexible work arrangements organization-wide.

Despite the growing trend of digitalization to streamline repeat HR processes and tasks, even within the BOC setup, the bank is emphasizes on the need for the human touch in HR.

It is what lends the all-essential organizational component of human capital, now being actively pushed worldwide as a quantifiable contributor to business success, humaneness.

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