Human Capital Responses To The COVID-19 Pandemic – The Conference Board

The Conference Board’s Human Capital Responses To The Covid-19 Pandemic – From Immediate Responses to Planning for the Reimagined Workplace report explores organizations’ returning to the workplace plans and the challenges they may need to overcome as this happens. Data from this research was collected from more than 150 human resources executives in America, during the first phase of the pandemic.

Some key findings from this report includes:

Only about half of surveyed respondents believed that their revenue would recover to pre-Covid levels in the next 12 months.
The five most important changes for organizations during the recovery period were ranked out as remote working, business recovery planning, office design, human resources policies and employee engagement.
A majority of HR executives believed that there would be substantial increases in the numbers of employees working remotely from home even after the pandemic.
Compared to the mostly professional and office workforce, the productivity of the mostly industry and manual services workforce has decreased evidently.
Most organizations have already applied restriction on important positions hiring, temporary stopped all recruitment activities or cut down working hours of employees as part of their responses to Covid-19. On the other hand, a majority of them plan to request employees to use their paid leave, run furloughs with benefits programs or postpone promotion, salary increase or bonuses in the next 3 months.
Of those who have implemented the above actions, organizations that decided to decrease payment rate for their employees, run furlough programs and cut down working hours seemed to have experienced substantial decrease in their revenue during the period.
The three most important matters HR executives will be focusing on when implementing their Covid-recovery plans are making sure the office is ready for the return of employees, set up schedules for different departments and teams to return to work and identify and be ready for any health and safety issues of employees after they are back to work.

Full report here.