In prolonged crises, traditional management approaches fall short as employees face ongoing uncertainty and stress. HR leaders must prioritize clarity, empathy, and consistent communication over forced positivity. Key challenges include outdated policies, unchanged expectations, and limited visibility into employee wellbeing. By enabling structured flexibility and leveraging technology, organizations can better support their workforce. Strong leadership during such times is defined by trust, stability, and a people-first approach.
“Am I still expected to come to work? The fuel queue near my place is unusually long this morning. I don’t know how long this will take.”
Ananya R.* has been an HR manager at a mid-sized services firm in Hyderabad for over a decade now. She has handled resignations, redundancies, and even a pandemic. But nothing had quite prepared her for the past week.
The company’s internal channels had started filling up early in the morning with questions from employees. People asking if they could work from home for a few days. Managers unsure what to say. By 9 a.m., she had multiple messages waiting, and no clear policy that addressed this exact situation.
Till recently, everything in Ananya’s day-to-day work had been predictable. Then, without much warning, small disruptions began to show up. Longer waits at petrol pumps. Commute uncertainty. Conversations at work shifting from schedules and deadlines to whether it made sense to come in at all.
As A. Narendra, an office-goer in Hyderabad, put it, “Normally, it takes about five minutes, today I have been waiting nearly half an hour.”
Source: The Times of India
The situation, at least for now, is not a crisis in the traditional sense. Offices are open. Work continues. But the conditions around work are beginning to shift in ways that most policies were not designed to handle.
Ananya is not an exception. In moments like these, HR leaders often find themselves fielding the same questions, absorbing uncertainty, and trying to hold their organizations steady. Often without the tools, policies, or frameworks to do it properly.
For many Indian teams, the disruption is not only local. A significant number of Indian professionals support Middle East operations directly, managing logistics, finance, and customer functions for businesses operating in the Gulf. India-based delivery centers supporting Gulf clients, whether in banking, retail, or supply chain, are among the first to feel it when conditions there shift. Timelines get renegotiated, escalations increase, and teams in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai find themselves absorbing the downstream impact of a situation unfolding thousands of kilometres away.
This piece is for them.
When the usual crisis playbook doesn’t quite apply
There is a meaningful difference between a crisis and the kind of prolonged disruption we’ve seen unfold across regions, including parts of the Middle East. It matters more than it sounds.
A crisis has a beginning, a peak, and eventually an end. Organizations have playbooks for crises – communicate, stabilize, and recover. Managers know how to sprint through them.
But how do you deal with situations when there’s no visible end on the horizon? The psychological weight in these cases is different. Both for employees and for the people managing them.
Even for organizations operating far from the epicenter, the impact rarely stays contained. It shows up indirectly. Commute patterns become unpredictable. Costs fluctuate. Teams begin to make small, individual adjustments before organizations formally respond.
For many Indian workplaces, the disruption is gradual.
Consider this situation: An employee is late after waiting in a long LPG queue. By afternoon, it turns into a work-from-home request. The manager is open to it, but there’s no clear guidance or system to act on it.
What this highlights is a gap between policy and reality. Employees are often dealing with situations that do not fit neatly into policy. External uncertainty begins to influence internal behaviour. Things like how people show up, how consistently they can work, and what they expect from their managers.
And yet, most organisations are still operating with playbooks designed for something more defined, more time-bound.
Managing people through prolonged crisis needs a different approach. Not a sprint, but a longer, more deliberate effort to hold teams steady under conditions that were never formally planned for.
The sooner HR leaders recognise that, the better the decisions they’ll make.
What Your People Actually Need Right Now
Here’s the thing about fear and uncertainty, they don’t respond to cheerfulness.
The instinct of many well-meaning managers right now is to project calm. To say “we’ve got this” and keep the energy up. That instinct, however understandable, often lands exactly wrong. What your people need is far simpler.
Clarity: Employees need to know exactly what is expected of them and what support exists. The questions sitting underneath most conversations right now are:
- What is expected of me this week?
- What happens if I can’t make it in?
- Can I ask for flexibility without it being held against me?
- Is it okay to say I’m not okay?
These questions are already starting to show up in internal team meetings and WhatsApp groups.
Psychological safety: This is not a long-term initiative. It is a basic requirement in the current environment. When employees cannot say they are struggling without wondering how it will be noted, they go quiet. And when that happens, managers lose visibility.
Flexibility: Employees need structure that allows for adjustment. Clear guidance on attendance, the ability to work remotely when needed, and managers who respond without delay.
Communication cadence: Silence from leadership creates confusion quickly. When people do not hear from their managers, they start filling in the gaps themselves. Regular, direct communication helps prevent that. Even when there is nothing new to say.
None of this is complex. It comes down to being clear, consistent, and available.
Where employers are unknowingly getting it wrong
Most employers failing their teams right now are not doing so out of indifference. They’re doing it out of habit.
The management muscle memory built in stable conditions – set goals, track output, reward performance – does not translate cleanly to a situation like this. But many managers continue to operate the same way because nothing has explicitly changed.
A few patterns keep showing up.
No visibility into who’s actually struggling:
Without structured check-ins or clear visibility, managers are operating on assumptions. They see who shows up to calls. They do not see who is dealing with uncertainty outside work, or who is adjusting their day to manage it. By the time it becomes visible, it is often already a problem.
Policies that don’t fit the moment:
Existing policies were not designed for situations like this. They assume predictability — fixed schedules, defined exceptions, clear categories. Situations like commute uncertainty or short-term disruption do not fit neatly into those structures. The result is hesitation. Managers are unsure what they can allow, and employees are unsure what they can ask for.
This is already beginning to show up in how employees respond. Many employees have taken to social media to implement work from home temporarily.
Source: NDTV.com
Over-reliance on informal channels:
In the absence of clear systems, communication shifts to informal channels. Messages get passed on WhatsApp. Decisions are made in chats. There is no record, no consistency, and no way to refer back when confusion arises.
Performance expectations left unchanged:
Expectations often remain exactly as they were. Targets stay the same. Timelines stay the same. The context around them changes. In some teams, this may not show up immediately. In others, especially where operations are more exposed to external conditions, it starts to create friction.
None of this is deliberate. It is a result of continuing to operate with assumptions that no longer hold.
And unless those assumptions are revisited, the gap between how work is expected to happen and how it actually happens will continue to widen.
A Practical Checklist for HR Leaders
If you’re an HR leader trying to find your footing right now, start with action. Here’s what you can do immediately.
Ensure continuity, not just attendance
The question is no longer who is present, but whether work can continue without disruption. That means making sure teams have the infrastructure to move between office and remote work without friction. Managers should have visibility into availability and output, not just presence.
Where Keka can help: Unified attendance and activity tracking that works across locations, with real-time visibility into availability and work.
Send one clear update
Do not wait for complete information. Share what is known. Clarify expectations for the week, what flexibility exists, and where employees can go for help. Not every organization will be able to offer reimbursements or additional support. Clarity matters more than coverage.
Where Keka can help: Centralized communication with acknowledgement tracking, so updates reach everyone and don’t get lost in informal channels.
Make it easy to switch modes of work
Moving from office to remote work should not depend on multiple approvals or manual coordination. The process should be simple enough that managers can make decisions quickly and employees can act on them without delay.
Where Keka can help: Flexible attendance and leave workflows that allow quick transitions without layered approvals.
Plan for disruption in advance
Assume schedules will not hold. Teams should know what to do when plans change. This could mean predefined backup coverage, flexibility in how work is scheduled, or the ability to shift work across locations without escalating.
Where Keka can help: Shift planning and workforce scheduling tools that allow quick reassignment and visibility across teams.
Review expectations with context
Before making changes, understand what is actually happening on the ground. Where work is being affected, adjust scope or timelines accordingly. Decisions should be based on visibility, not assumptions.
Where Keka can help: Goal tracking and productivity visibility that connects work output with timelines and effort.
Acknowledge effort in real time
Recognition does not need to be formal. A simple acknowledgement in team forums helps reinforce what matters and keeps people engaged when conditions are uncertain.
Where Keka can help: Built-in recognition and feedback tools that make appreciation visible and immediate.
Create a way to listen at scale
Do not rely only on one-on-one conversations. Use lightweight, regular check-ins to understand how teams are doing. This creates a clearer picture across the organisation and helps surface issues early.
Where Keka can help: Pulse surveys and continuous feedback mechanisms that provide real-time sentiment visibility.
Technology as a Stabilizer, Not Just a Tool
In moments of prolonged uncertainty, HR technology stops being about efficiency. It becomes about continuity and care. Let us share three scenarios and how technology can help.
Scenario 1
A manager stops focusing on where people are working from and starts focusing on whether they are able to show up at all. A few team members begin working from home for a few days due to commute uncertainty. No policy changes are made. The manager simply adapts.
How can technology help?
Location-agnostic attendance, remote check-ins, and systems that allow flexibility without requiring constant exceptions.
Scenario 2
A team lead adjusts timelines slightly but continues tracking work. Not to control output, but to maintain visibility. When questions come up, they are able to explain what has shifted and why.
How can technology help?
Task tracking, timesheets, and documented work logs that provide a clear view of what is happening across teams.
Scenario 3
An HR team starts receiving more requests than usual. Questions about working from home, attendance, and short-term flexibility. Responses slow down as everything is handled manually.
How can technology help?
Self-service systems, mobile access, and structured workflows that allow employees to raise requests and get responses without dependency on back-and-forth communication.
This is what modern HR tech is built for – not the smooth-running quarter, but the quarter where everything is harder than it should be, and HR leaders need to make good decisions fast. If you’re rethinking how you support your people through this, we’d love to show you what Keka can do.
Stability is a leadership choice
You cannot control what is happening outside your organization. You cannot control the news cycle, the uncertainty, or the conditions your employees are dealing with before they start their workday.
What you can control is how your organization responds.
Whether your people have clarity about what is expected. Whether support is accessible when they need it. Whether their manager checked in this week. Whether decisions are consistent.
The organizations that come through periods like this with their teams intact are not the ones waiting for things to stabilize before acting. They are the ones that treat stability as something they create, not something they wait for.
HR leadership in this moment is not about having all the answers. It is about staying visible, making decisions with context, and ensuring that people are not left to figure things out on their own.
Disclaimer: *Some names and identifying details have been changed. Quotes are drawn from composite accounts representative of experiences shared by HR professionals and managers across the region.
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