Global Business Services (GBS) has been proven as a service provider that provides high-end solutions and consultation for many activities internally to their other departments or externally to other clients worldwide. Their businesses were very important for many strategic partners who planned to reduce operating costs and utilise high-end technologies available in the market. During Covid 19, the GBS industry is not excluded from the blow, where talent management, business operation, business strategy, and financial management are disrupted. Semi-structured interviews were done with top management of four GBS companies in Malaysia from October 2020 until January 2021 to explore the effect of COVID-19 on their business and how they managed to sustain during the pandemic. The interviews revealed that GBS companies must promptly adapt and adjust to a new working environment, such as working from home and changing their business operations entirely. Although GBS generally operates on a digital platform that could work remotely globally as a separate unit, the pandemic has shifted the separation to individual employees, each working remotely from home. GBS managed to slowly recover from the financial constraint during the earlier stage of the pandemic; some GBS even performed better with rewards to their staff. This research also implied that GBS needs to have a backup plan during the pandemic and always get ready with the latest technology to survive in the long runIt also raised a concern to practitioners and researchers regarding the importance of good planning and motivation in every single activity so that everyone is in an excellent position to maintain their performance even during unpredictable occasions. Future research suggested exploring the GBS’s new working environment-working at home arrangement, transforming processes end to end, and the new technologies adopted by this industry in their businesses.
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In-Text Citation: (Sanusi et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Sanusi, S., Ghazali, A. W., Azahar, N. F. N., Aman, A., Fernandez, D., & Adznan, S. (2022). The Effect of Covid-19 Pandemic on the Global Business Services Industry in Malaysia: Surviving the Business Onslaught. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(12), 1435–1454.
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