About a dozen years ago, Andrew Dawson was involved in an industry project called HR 2020—an effort to prepare the field and its practitioners for the presumptive trends poised to reshape the profession. Focus areas included the integration of technology into HR and the function’s growing capacity to influence business decisions.

By 2020, both predictions certainly bore out—the latter of which exploded exponentially owing to another unforeseen influencer: the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The one thing no one ever thought about when we were planning for HR in 2020 was the impact a global pandemic would have,” says Dawson, who is now chief people officer and head of corporate affairs at ophthalmic equipment manufacturer BVI Medical. “We just never prepared for something that would shut down the entire world.”

Five years after the shutdowns started, HR has enough runway to start understanding the pandemic’s lasting impact on the function, he says. While projects like HR 2020 were designed to help people professionals plan for the future, part of being forward-thinking, Dawson adds, involves keeping an eye to the past.

“Now, it’s important for HR to say, ‘What are the lessons we learned?’ ”

Pursuing the ‘right thing to do’ for employees

It was challenging for HR to glean any insights into the potential long-term impacts of the pandemic early on because things were moving so quickly and fluidly.

“I’ve led HR through a lot of transformations, but I imagine 2020-2022 supersedes it all,” says Monique Herena, chief colleague experience officer at American Express. “I joined American Express in 2019, and none of us knew what was coming a year later.”

Herena, a recently inducted Fellow of the National Academy of HR, says the pace at which HR had to respond to the pandemic when it hit the U.S. in March 2020 helped HR professionals reconnect with and laser-focus on a core tenet of the profession: holistically, and empathetically, supporting talent.

“At the end of the day, we were dealing with the health and safety of our people all around the world, and their loved ones, and that had to be our No. 1 priority,” Herena says.

A lesson in uncertainty

In the first weeks and months, many organizations turned to layoffs, furloughs and other cost-cutting measures to stem the impact of potential business outcomes. However, American Express avoided such measures, Herena says, as leaders acknowledged that the tide would eventually turn, and “colleagues and customers will remember who had their back.”

It was an approach, she says, that was rooted in a “long-term view of what’s the right thing to do.”

Keeping that focus at the forefront helped HR navigate a time in which information changed quickly and decisions had to be made without the full context of their impact—an experience that, she says, continues to help HR lead with both empathy and agility.

“Information shifted sometimes within the same day. We told people one thing with the best information we had, and then we had to tell them something else at the end of the day—with no ego, but because it was the right thing to do,” Herena says. “We did a lot of checking in, a lot of listening, a lot of learning.”

 

Getting results quickly

In doing so, Herena’s team knew that employees needed support. That prompted American Express to expand its investment in employee mental health—rolling out a mental health concierge service to offer personalized support, doubling the number of free counseling sessions previously available, adding virtual support sessions, enhancing grief and bereavement policies, for example.

As the pandemic began to demystify the already growing mental health crisis in the country, it prompted many in HR to step up and make employee mental health a cornerstone of the people function’s responsibility.

At American Express, Herena says, HR recognized the need for managers and leaders to be better prepared to talk about mental health with their teams, prompting new companywide training.

Having to design and roll out these new programs at the drop of a dime allowed the HR function to flex muscles it likely already had but hadn’t ever been tasked with fully leveraging, says Ernest Marshall, executive vice president and CHRO of global power management company Eaton and another recent Fellow inductee of the National Academy of HR.

“In COVID, we learned how to make decisions and make them quickly,” he says. “Fail fast and pivot. Be very agile in what we were thinking. And then be creative.”

A reinvented relationship

Within the first few months of COVID, HR innovation flourished, as people teams scrambled to support employees—largely with no playbooks.

For instance, in the spring of 2020, tech giant IBM unveiled its Work From Home Pledge, emphasizing to employees the value of work/life integration—that handling family crises during the work day was acceptable and that camera-on meetings weren’t always a priority. At PwC, workers were given a $250 stipend each time they took a full week of paid time off—up to four times a year—in response to rising concerns in the early days of the pandemic about employee burnout.

HR teams also addressed the unique stressors facing certain populations: Bank of America, for example, provided tailored support and guidance to the more than 300 people employed through its program for workers with intellectual disabilities. The bank offered individualized training on how to communicate virtually, remote team-building events and home-delivery of medications.

At Verizon, HR was among the functions that designed a “collaborative career engine” offering women—both inside and outside the company—access to digital resources aimed at personal and professional development, which was partly in response to the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on women’s career growth.

Call for creativity

At the time, Verizon’s then-CHRO Christy Pambianchi told HR Executive the pandemic was presenting HR an “opportunity to throw out the rule book and find new, creative ways” to support employees.

“We did some very creative things that people weren’t thinking about—a lot of organic work,” Marshall of Eaton adds.

HR’s ability to lead that work was essential, as the employee-employer relationship transformed during COVID, and people teams became the critical lynchpin in bridging that gap.

For instance, as workers adapted to new norms for working remotely, their expectations for trust and flexibility from their employer increased, Dawson says, and HR had to help their organizations in the race to keep up.

Now, as some organizations seek to drive workers back to the office, HR is often caught between a workforce craving flexibility and an executive team wanting more control. Dawson says the challenge creates another opportunity for HR to lean on its early pandemic lessons of centering employee needs.

“These return-to-office mandates? I don’t get it, I just don’t get it,” Dawson says. “I hate the phrase hybrid work. It’s more about, you do your work where you can be the most productive.”

When HR can take a step back to think about what the workforce wants—and why—Dawson says, it boils down to “Do we trust our employees to do the work we asked them to do without us having to see them physically in the office? Since COVID, one of the biggest things I hope we’re really doing at BVI is showing that we trust our employees more.”

‘We’re all still recovering from COVID’

Conversations about remote work and return-to-office became HR’s to lead in the C-suite and boardrooms during and after the pandemic, one of the many factors that have raised the function’s profile as a strategic contributor.

“COVID pulled back the curtain on how critical and important the HR function really is,” Marshall says.

On one hand, that has enabled HR to deepen and leverage executive relationships to help advance the HR agenda, Marshall says. But, with “a new issue just about every day now,” he says, the heightened expectations for HR leadership do put people professionals at risk of having their “dance card getting pulled quite a bit.”

As a profession, he says, HR needs to stay laser-focused on “all the things that enhance our teams and companies,” not losing sight of the spotlight COVID-19 shone on employee wellbeing—for the workforce and HR professionals themselves.

Even though the pandemic is largely in the rearview mirror, Marshall says, the HR function and its practitioners continue to feel the effects.

“COVID was probably the most exhausting two-and-a-half years for HR,” Marshall says. “We’re seeing it now in the number of people whose CHRO tenure is ending by their own choice. We’re all still recovering from COVID, to be honest.”

The post COVID-19, five years later: Why HR is ‘still recovering’ appeared first on HR Executive.