KUALA LUMPUR: Most small and medium enterprises (SME) in Malaysia have not created crisis management teams that deal with business-critical functions and many are unable to forecast plans to future events like this.
In addition, there are 98.5 per cent of SMEs in Malaysia are still unfamiliar with new tools that could benefit their businesses.
Swingvy Sdn Bhd co-founder and chief executive officer Jin Choeh said therefore, there is a need for proper guidance on how to use digital technologies to reach more customers, automate their business operations and secure their company information in a time of crisis.
"With the coronavirus, a lot of attention has been placed on remote working collaboration tools to ensure unified collaboration and communication. However, many human resource (HR) leaders are relatively slow to adopt and change their HR management resources.
"A crisis response management plan is needed to swiftly take HR operations from offline-to- online.
"Adopting proper HR software will be one of the major solutions to manage people operations," he told The New Straits Times recently.
Jin said Malaysia has always scored among the highest in the region in terms of digital readiness, according to global surveys. However, the drive by industry players themselves falls short.
"Malaysian organisations need to boost its appetite to take this route given the changing environment of the workforce," he said, adding thata study by Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Review found that cultural changes are key to digital transformation rather than technological ones.
Swingvy manages a HR app that helps small business owners handle their administration and payroll processes on an online platform.
When asked on solutions, Jin said the best way HR managers can support employees is not changing or adding the existing policies or process but can only be achieved by having a matured technology that will help to keep the trust between company and employees.
"The most important step is to exercise and maintain a plan. With resources too few and costs too high, services like Swingvy are great ways for companies to test new technologies.
"If organisations are serious about tapping into the potential of remote workers, it needs to invest in the best technologies to make sure end-to-end tools are not just suggested but are incorporated into all processes," he said.
When asked on the challenges in the current work-from-home policies in Malaysia, Jin said The Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) did say the way forward is for the government - as the largest employer in the country - to lead the way by allowing employees who don’t need to be in the office to work from home and use various tools in place.
"However, beyond that, the government needs to continuously set strategies with substantial plan to support SMEs," he said.
Jin said Swingvy’s mission is to create a workplace where work empowers people.
It does this by helping businesses functions move from offline to online — including HR, claims, payroll and benefits.
"We automate administrative work, saving Malaysia’s time- strapped SMEs valuable time and money especially in a pandemic like the Covid-19 situation," he said.