2020 HR Trends During and After COVID-19

The novel coronavirus pandemic has upended the workplace, and some of the effects are here to stay

As of May 28^th, more than 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment. Over 100,000 small businesses have closed for good since March. And nearly two-thirds of Americans have worked from home during the coronavirus lockdowns.

These are staggering numbers that were unthinkable as recently as February. The rapid economic upheaval caused by COVID-19 has fundamentally altered the workplace, forcing businesses to adapt to survive. Regardless of the uncertain course of the virus, many of these changes are here to stay. And they will be joined by new ones aimed at navigating the new normal.

Here is a look at some of the potential trends facing human resources and the business world:

Reinventing work

The U.S. is headed into a recession, and no one is sure whether the recovery will be V-, U-, or W-shaped. What is certain is that with 40 million unemployed, not everyone who lost their job will get it back as employers restructure the workforce. Many companies will lack the money to restore their pre-COVID-19 staff, while others won’t necessarily have the same operations. Some organizations have innovated new ways to get things done that deprioritize certain positions and call for entirely new ones.

Numerous businesses have or will:

1. Redefine the nature of work—rethinking their approach to accomplishing tasks
2. Develop new processes
3. Adapt the roles and responsibilities of various positions
4. Assess what they can afford in payroll
5. Examine how their fundamental economic model has changed
6. Analyze the physical layout of offices and the need for physical space

There are innumerable ways that these adaptations can play out. For example, consider a warehouse. When an order arrived before COVID-19, a clerk may have recorded it and sent instructions to the warehouse workers, noting the location of the item. Various processes ensued to find and pull the pallet with the product and ship it, depending on where it was going and how much was sent.

After the pandemic—and after the company may have developed new processes—there may be no need for that intermediary between an online order and the warehouse. Instead of a human team, an automated system is in place. And now there is a new need, perhaps on a contract basis, for an individual who manages this system. This organization’s human resources needs have changed.

Remote work is here to stay—with follow-on effects

Remote work had been growing in popularity before the pandemic; “about 29 percent of college graduates worked from home at least some of the time.” But many organizations resisted the idea due to concerns about productivity or whether the arrangement would fit certain operations. COVID-19 has forced the situation.

Remote positions will remain with us on a larger scale, due to several factors:

1. Companies realize that offsite work can be accomplished without a loss of productivity or essential business functions.
   
   
2. Employees have come to the same realization while valuing the flexibility of this arrangement. There will likely be a higher demand for flexible-work benefits, even as they navigate a more competitive job market.
   
   
3. Companies are worried about liability as government lockdowns and mandates for social distancing ease. Without a national liability shield in place, many businesses will continue social distancing to avoid COVID-19 infections and the potential lawsuits and workers compensation claims that arise from them.

This new dynamic will spur a redesign of workforces and workspaces. Some positions may become permanently remote; others may go away entirely after businesses realize that an in-person employee is unnecessary. The overall need for physical office space may decline as companies look to slash overhead during a recession. And of the offices that resume on-site operations, new physical arrangements that limit potential infections will be put into place.

More onboarding and training will take place online

All of this potential restructuring will require getting employees up to speed quickly and doing it in adaptative ways. In previous blogs, we discussed different learning styles and how a mix of training vehicles often achieves the best results. But in the current environment, the trend is clear: most training and a great deal of onboarding will take place online.

COVID-19 has created an explosion in online communication and learning, and there is no sign of it slowing down. Individuals are stressing servers watching YouTube videos, participating in webinars, and employing video-conferencing software. The most widely known platform, Zoom, grew from 10 million daily participants in video conferences before the crisis to 300 million at the end of April.

Companies will hesitate to call employees into a conference room for days of training, and many organizations may not have the option. The only choice will be to onboard and train employees online, regardless of their preferred learning style. Fortunately, online media and communication statistics show that there are far greater acceptance and comfort with technology learning. Many people are embracing it—and it’s here to stay.

A shift from a candidate’s market to an employer’s market, and the rise of outsourcing

Tens of millions of people are jobless, and organizations have implemented hiring freezes to safeguard cash flow. Hiring is happening, however. And it will resume at companies that will soon be in a position to grow or are reorienting their operations and need new jobs to do it.

Nevertheless, the crisis’s main impact will be a shift from a candidates’ market to an employers’ market. Consequently, some of the benefits and extra steps that companies took to attract top talent in a tight labor market will fall by the wayside. Candidates and current employees will be less picky about company culture and branding when the job market looks bleak, and this reality will likely extend to demand for salary and benefits. Many individuals will be satisfied with stable employment.

As of this writing—many of the people who have lost their jobs worked in service, retail, and other relatively low-skilled positions, though layoffs have started to impact highly skilled employees. The course of the pandemic and recession will determine precisely how competition in the labor market shakes out. But some companies will still need to compete for a small pool of candidates and to retain vital employees.

Fortunately, there is a range of benefits that can drive engagement and satisfaction without significantly impacting the bottom line of cash-strapped companies. In particular, wellness programs—financial and health—will remain appealing. And well-designed incentives can keep top performers happy while directly reflecting the organization’s success and cash flow.

A corollary of this new job market and businesses’ need to restructure is an increase in outsourcing. Just as many enterprises learned that remote work works, they also realize that in-house positions can be replaced with contract workers at a lower cost. This trend includes numerous white-collar jobs that were never really considered outsourceable. One example is found in the legal industry, which is not well-known for innovative hiring arrangements. There is a rising demand for contract lawyers and paralegals hired by firms and corporate legal departments on an interim basis to fill specific legal niches.

From network engineers to marketing professionals, many organizations will run the cost-benefit analysis of outsourced workers and replace high-overhead positions.

There are many more trends—and HR will play a pivotal role in all of them

How do I restructure my business and find the right people to take on new roles? How do I weed through a wave of applicants to find great candidates? And how do I onboard and train employees remotely? The answers to these questions—among many others—will rely on tapping the expertise of human resources professionals.

All of these trends involve quickly coming up with and executing new strategic plans while the world is changing, and the end game is not clear. But a silver lining of this massive disruption is that it has spurred a great deal of innovation. And it is a lot easier to build something new during a crisis without having to tear down the existing structure.

Many companies are going to have to rebuild or significantly adapt. And now more than ever, HR has a critical role to play as a business-process architect. To learn more about how to improve your company’s sourcing, candidate selection, benefits, and onboarding, contact Karp HR Solutions today for a free consultation.