How has the coronavirus pandemic affected the priorities of HR departments?

Methodology

Between January and March 2020, we conducted numerous interviews with human resource (HR) professionals to discover the difficulties and challenges they face, and how the priorities for HR teams vary from one country to another.

As a European company with offices in Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and of course London, we wanted to explore these questions in greater detail. For this reason, we worked with YouGov to help us conduct a survey of over 700 HR professionals from France, Germany, Spain and the UK.

The study aimed to provide a realistic overview of how HR managers perceived their profession at the time, their vision, priorities and expectations for the future.

Shortly after receiving the results, coronavirus arrived and changed – more or less overnight – the priorities of hundreds of thousands of organisations across Europe.

Instead of completely discarding the research done for the study, we thought it would be a good idea to take the results and analyse them retrospectively and in light of the pandemic.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be analysing the key challenges that HR professionals listed pre-coronavirus. However, we will be focusing exclusively on the results gathered in the UK where over 200 HR professionals were surveyed.

You can read our first article on employee wellbeing pre and post-pandemic.