Professional Development and Practice

Introduction to ASDA:

ASDA is one of the largest British supermarket retailers. It gives tough competition to the retailers like Tesco, Sainsbury, Lidl and Aldi etc. The company was established in the year 1949. After, Tesco mentioned company comes at second rank in the UK market. ASDA offered a wide variety of products to the customers (Steps we have taken in response to the Coronavirus outbreak., 2020). These products are groceries, clothes, furniture, food items etc. Apart from this, ASDA also provides other services like financial services and mobile services to its customers. ASDA total number of employees are 1, 65,000 and the firm is operating through stores in 631 locations.

Scenario:

Currently, corona pandemic is going on across the world and these affect nation’s economies. ASDA business also heavily gets affected due to corona pandemic. ASDA planned to cut 4000 jobs in the market. The operational performance of the ASDA also gets affected. Not only operational performance HR performance also declines significantly. HR is worried about coronary disease and social distancing makes them realize that disease is going on a large scale and there life is at risk. Further, due to social distancing employees are not able to enjoy their life like they do before corona originate. Individuals cannot meet each other at public place. Moreover, chances of job loss and become ill due to corona are another factors that makes employees feel depressed. Consequently, performance on floor decline (Mahmud, Talukder and Rahman, 2020).

Present research aimed at identifying extent to which employees at ASDA feel depressed or remain in stress and its impact on their job performance. In this regard, multiple changes that individuals observed in their personal life after corona pandemic due to social distancing will be taken into account. It will be identified whether it leads to depression and decline in job performance. Thus, through present research study main aim is to explore ways in which social distancing created a multiple problems for the individuals and these problems lead to depression and decline in performance on the floor (Khan, Farooq and Khan, 2020).

Some of the aspects on which focus will be are reduced social interaction, and change in routine, feeling of low self esteem, motivation to prevent illness and irresponsible behavior of customers at the workplace. Many individuals believed that less social interaction is also making them depressed. Individuals often after working hours meet with their friends and relatives and spend some time with them. Due to social distancing now this is not or less part of life which lead to origination of anxiety among individuals. Thus, due to this reason the present research study is conducted and by doing so it will be identified whether social distancing lead to depression among individuals. If yes, then whether it affect employee performance at the workplace.

 

 

 

Conclusion and recommendation:

On the basis of the above discussion, it is concluded that social distancing caused depression among individuals that worked at ASDA retail stores. However, social distancing caused depression in multiple ways. Social distancing can be classified into two categories, namely one that was imposed by the Government in form of lockdown and another one that individuals themselves follow during daily routine (Shindel, Holland and Gallagher-Thompson, 2020). In both cases, individuals lost to a great extent their freedom and not able to fulfill their desire to meet beloved ones and enjoy the weekend and doing a party at the end of the month. So, basically social distancing lead to loss of freedom and unfulfilled desires which lead to anxiety and depression. Moreover, social distancing makes the individual feel that corona is going on a large scale and deaths are happening on large number. Thus, social distancing psychologically generate a feeling in individuals that condition is very serious and due to this reason one feel anxiety and then comes to depression.

Apart from this, on many occasions individuals observe that people nearby to them are not following social distancing related guidelines in a proper manner. This thing frustrates individuals and creates a fear factor in them that they can come in contact to corona virus in the workplace. Means that if someone is not following social distancing, then in that case one feel frustrated and by following social distancing one feel that it’s become socially isolated and life become bored and feel depressed (Zhou and et.al., 2020). In other words, it can be said that if one follow social distancing and sees the others are not following same concept then it goes into depression in each situation. This is because on one hand, one is feeling that life is at risk and on the other hand, it feels that it’s become socially isolated.

It is also concluded that stress and depression are directly impacting employee’s performance on the job. Companies are providing variance protection related items to the employees, but still there is a threat. Employees at retail stores follow rules, but customers did not do so. Hence, fear remains among employees that they may suffer from corona and due to this reason they are not able to focus on job consistently in a proper manner (Kufi and et.al., 2020). It can be said that depression directly affects employee’s performance in the workplace. Hence, in such kind of situation there is need to adopt some of the measures so that employees did not feel or feel less anxiety. In this regard, some recommendations are given below.

• Conducting meditation exercise: Meditation exercise sessions must be conducted online or at the workplace. Meditation techniques assist one to fight with stress and depression. If one does meditation with full concentration it can easily come out of depression. Hence, ASDA must conduct meditation related sessions at its workplace. In this regard, contact must be established with expert (Wei and et.al., 2020). It will be better that any Doctor is hired for this purpose. This is because mentioned individual have knowledge of meditation and ways in which it works in individual brain.
• Making available gloves to the customers: Gloves must be made available to the customers when they enter the premises. By doing so it will be ensured that with bare hands customers will not be able to touch each other.
• Charging penalty: In case ASDA did not make available gloves to the customers than it can charge a penalty on those who comes with bare hands. As alternative ASDA can deny those from entering premises that did not have gloves with them.
• Guiding customers at the workplace: Customers can be guided in a better way at the workplace about social distancing (Siddamreddy and et.al., 2020). This will make feel employees that guidelines are not violated and their life is secured at the workplace
• Giving frequent breaks to groups of employees: Multiple breaks must be given to the employees and by that time they must be allowed to talk to each other while maintaining distance. Frequent break will assist in reducing their stress level at the workplace.

 

References:

Books and Journals:

Alipour, A. and et.al., 2020. A New Self-Reported Assessment Measure for COVID-19 Anxiety Scale (CDAS) in Iran: A Web-Based Study. Iranian Journal of Public Health.
Bukhari, S. H.. and Bukhari, S. M. H. 2020. The Post-Corona World and International Political Landscape: Emerging Challenges. Journal of Business and Social Review in Emerging Economies. 6(2). 453-461.
CAO, S., FENG, P. and SHI, P. 2020. Study on the epidemic development of corona virus disease-19 (COVID-19) in Hubei province by a modified SEIR model. Journal of Zhejiang University (Medical Science). 49(1), 0-0.
Cattelan, V. 2020. Sacred Euro: sovereign debt (s) and EU bare credit in the Corona crisis. Available at SSRN 3592382.
de Araújo Filho, W. D. and et.al., 2020. Nebulizers: aerodynamic droplet diameter characterization and physicochemical properties of drugs to treat severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (sars-cov-2). International Journal of Research-GRANTHAALAYAH. 8(7). 80-97.
Deng, S. L., Chen, J. G. and Wang, F. 2020. Microglia: A Central Player in Depression. Current Medical Science. 40(3),. 391-400.
Flick, U. 2015. Introducing research methodology: A beginner’s guide to doing a research project. Sage.
Fraenkel, P. and Cho, W. L. 2020. Reaching Up, Down, In, and Around: Couple and Family Coping During the Corona Virus Pandemic. Family Process.
Gunawan, C. I. 2020. Star 0Happy: A New Civilization The Instant Mass Strategy to Overcome Corona virus, Fears, and Hunger in Various Countries. IRDH Book Publisher.
Hannah, M., Hutta, J. S.. and Schemann, C. 2020. Thinking Corona measures with Foucault. Zitierdatum. 14. 20.

 

 

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