Does HR exist in Maldives?

Does HR exist in the flattest country in the world? The question sounds ridiculous, but it is, nevertheless, warranted. Before we delve into it, it’s time for the tale as old as time itself - the Covid-19 pandemic and its impacts.

The Maldivian population comprises of 515,696 people dispersed across 185 islands. The economy is primarily based on tourism which comprises a majority 26% share of the country’s GDP. After facing the brunt of the pandemic, it impacted employment across the sector by two-fold - 54%.

After the closure of the border and strict virus containment measures, particularly in the Greater Malé region, a large majority of MSMEs stopped operating completely or were working with reduced hours during the period of April-July 2020. Subsequently, the slowing demand substantially reduced sales and revenue of most businesses. Meanwhile, businesses were incurring additional costs of operating during the context of ‘the New Normal’.

Soon, however, things did take a turn towards the sunnier side. The BCC survey undertaken in April/May 2020 showed how businesses were adopting innovative measures to adapt to the Covid-19 situation. Businesses ramped up online presence and marketing through social media channels, some facilitated work-from-home arrangements, or reducing prices to increase sales.

However, quite notably, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, thanks to relatively high broadband and mobile internet penetration in the country. According to a study, about 63% of the Maldivian population used the internet in 2020, which is a higher proportion than in other South Asian countries. Therefore, the potential to use digital technologies to improve services like business, health, education, etc, is tremendous.

To enable Maldivian businesses recover from the impact of the pandemic and assimilate the benefits of digital transformation would require more tailored assistance and accelerated support for the adaption of digital tools.

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Are current HR systems in Maldives sufficient?

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To accelerate the adoption of digital transformation and provide tailored solutions to business needs means digitizing people operations as well. Access to internet has not been a major hindrance to digital adaption, but, the systems to empower employee productivity and performance in a pandemic recovery setting needs to be set at par.

Now, to address the question of this blog - Does HR exist in the Maldives? Sure, it does. But, has digital HR transformed to meet the needs of a newly adjusted workforce?

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The need for new-age platforms

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The current digital HR systems in the Maldives provide provide the basics - Core HR, talent management from recruitment to performance, payroll management and employee engagement. However, now is the era of the hybrid workforce - one that that has grown beyond outdated needs and organizational strategies. People and organizations are becoming increasingly mobile. Therefore, HR solutions in Maldives need to step-up from providing just the basics to empowering workforces to transform the way they work during the recovery phase of the pandemic.

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1. Transforming engagement

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Employee engagement is an internal organizational success. And the tremendous advancements in business and HR technology have grown to become quintessential to ensure employee engagement. Increasing engagement doesn’t just mean increasing employee productivity. It means to maintain a positive relationship between the organization and its employees.

A positive relationship is built when employees are absorbed and enthusiastic about their work. But, building a culture of engagement among today’s workforce means adopting the right tools to foster great employee experiences.

With social collaboration tools like employee feedback forums, employee recognitions, and ideation platforms, employees are enabled to harness recognizable and easy to use tools to connect and collaborate with employees and teams.

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2. Agile performance management

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Performance management is the backbone process for any organization. If done wrongly, could be difficult to recover from. The new age of agile performance management is paperless, continuous, and automated for recurring cycles and provides drill-down across organizations, teams and individuals.

The days of stressful planning, rollouts and performance measure are long gone. With powerful platform solutions, organizations can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their talent management and make the process a breeze.

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3. Recruitment redefined

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As Maldives recovers from the impacts of the pandemic, it will lead to the eventual growth in job opportunities and a boom in candidate applications. In order to curb what could otherwise aggravate the recruitment system, organizations have to harness the new age recruitment technologies.

New technologies like resume parsing could read resumes using machine learning and avoiding the need for data entry. Once the resume is read by the system, applying probability determination to all the resumes for matching the job needs can also be done by the software. Once the probability is applied, it's an easy task for ranking the most suitable resumes that can perform the work without pulling in additional people into the manual filtering process. Once the filters are in place, it's as easy as coordinating, scheduling, tracking, offering and onboarding of the qualified candidates.

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4. Intelligent analytics

It is said that 86% of a Human Resources job is collecting, scrubbing and analyzing data and responding to queries. With advanced technology to help, this number can be drastically reduced freeing time and resources to focus on the critical need for HR, to listen, connect, resolve and align employees and employee issues.

A new age platform comes in built with deep HR analytics and customer report generators that make it really easy to pre-empt issues. Heats maps showing which teams are facing what sort of issues, insights into who are the best performers, recruiters, what are the best performing teams and a lot more can be at your fingertips.

The custom report builder can provide for any kind of query and report that you will need to provide leaders and management on a real time or a periodic basis.

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5. Hybrid work management

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I call this the cherry on the top of digital HR. The workforce in Maldives if going remote, mobile, and hybrid. Therefore, they need a system that is as flexible as their changing needs. HR mobile applications enables employees to connect with their peers, keep track of personal data, and even manage the recruitment process.

It is essentially the power of self-service and simplicity transferred from a web application to a hand-held device.

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HR exists with peopleHum

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Businesses and HR in Maldives would need to alter their people management processes to get faster and more efficient. The people have already witnessed the potential of technology during the pandemic. It has enabled them to stay connected, to communicate and collaborate and keep the economy moving. People technology built around the needs of an employee and the organization will become the de facto. Integrated platforms that bring in the power of the latest technology and HR software in Maldives will become omni-present.

peopleHum’s user-friendly and powerful Human Capital Management platform is designed for the complete employee experience journey from hiring to offboarding. Maldives’ hybrid & new-age workforces are in need of the systems and tools that matches their capabilities and their potential.

Enable your employees to communicate, collaborate, and focus on resilience and productivity through a unique approach focused on experience design. All for a value equation for the Maldvian market priced in Maldivian rufiyaa that is hard to beat.

No wonder a plethora of companies of all sizes and partners, integrators and consultants are flocking to peopleHum to drive the future of cloud based human capital platforms in markets like the Maldives.

Reach out to us to hear our story and how we can help your organization align and transform into the organization of the future.

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