In 2020, the world was turned upside down because of the Coronavirus (Covid 19) outbreak. Some lockdown measures and the new ways of working will have a long-lasting effect on the economy, business, and our working lives. In this blog, we’re going to look at the impact COVID had on employee experience and engagement at different points over the last few years, and what HR professionals and leaders must continue to do to navigate out of it for the future.
Quantum Workplace Benchmark report (May 2020)
In the first five months of 2020, Quantum workplace used their ‘best places to work’ survey, and had over 470,000 responses from across 6,000 organisations in the US. They benchmarked against the same survey conducted in 2019 to look at the following research questions:
- How has Covid 19 impacted employee engagement?
- What areas of employee engagement changed most dramatically during the crisis?
- How have different types of workers been differentially impacted by the Covid 19 crisis?
Finding 1
When the crisis hit the US and caused detrimental damage to people’s lives, business, jobs, and the economy it was natural that employee engagement dipped slightly but then had meaningful growth. At the start, ‘highly engaged’ dipped to 70%, but then saw an increase to 83% when restrictions were put into place. This peak in engagement represents an 11% increase overall compared to the engagement levels during the same period in 2019.
Finding 2
Economic indicators such as initial claims for unemployment and stock market indicators appeared to coincide with changes in employee engagement. Stock market (Dow Jones industrial average) appears to correlate with dip and rises in employee engagement. Initial weekly unemployment claims went up in March at the same time as employee engagement started to climb.
Finding 3
Increase in favourability in items related to leaderships, communication, and wellbeing increased. The longest year-on-year item level differences were related to communication and leadership, which say 7% and 8% increase. Increased favourability in health, wellbeing, and work life balance also had an increased in engagement.
Finding 4
Employees who might have been most impacted by COVID 19 restrictions saw the highest increase in favourability. Arts, entertainment, and recreation were down 7% and non-profit organisations up 15% in engagement. Small differences between hourly and salary workers with hourly workers having a larger increase in engagement.
McKinsey & Company (June 2020)
In June 2020, McKinsey and Company published an article which surveyed more than 800 US – based employees on a wide variety of topics relating to employee experience.
Their findings found that:
- People working remotely saw more positive effects on their daily work and are more engaged
- Remote workers have a stronger sense of wellbeing than those in non-remote jobs with little flexibility
- Parents working from home appeared to fair better than those who are more isolated
- Fathers working remotely seem to be more positive about the experience than Mothers
Interestingly, more than 80% of respondents say that the crisis was materially affecting their daily lives – which proves one of the fundamental truths about employee experience – that people have a widely varied experience, perspectives, and outcomes.
McKinsey and Company go onto talk about the opportunity’s organisations have to rethink the employee experience in ways that respect individual differences:
- Home lives
- Skills and capabilities
- Mindsets
- Personal characteristics
The article mentions that with advances in listening techniques, behavioural science, data analytics, communications, and other technology leaders will be able to address employee experience in a more targeted and dynamic way. Actions will be able to be tailored to make it much more personalised.
The research sets out three overarching insights and included practical steps that can be taken:
- As a leader you will have had to make sweeping changes to address needs, and your employees have trusted your judgment that this is right. Continue to build trust created in the first part of the pandemic by being present, action orientated. Empathise and be fully transparent.
- In addition to basic needs (safety and security) three other experience themes (trusting relationships, social cohesion, and individual purpose) are having a disproportionate impact on employee wellbeing and productivity. Enable improvements by prioritising actions that will address a broad set of needs for the majority of the workforce.
- Changes have been coming thick and fast. Some people struggle with change, and some thrive. Use a combination of science, technology, and data analytics to segment your employees to tailor interventions to support in personalised and meaningful ways.
CIPD (September 2020)
In September 2020 CIPD published an article which followed on the CIPD ‘Good Work Index’, specifically looking at people’s experience of wok during the pandemic.
This UK based research is a monthly survey, and the findings had some similarities to what was being experienced by people in the US:
- The data showed that work life balance, wellbeing, and job security was a challenge during the pandemic
- The proportion of workers who were furloughed decreased from 25% in May to 17% in June but there was an increase in normal working hours from 49% in May to 59% in June.
- 58% of people were still working at home in June but this had dropped since April
- 7 in 10 were satisfied with the way their employers responded to COVID with the same proportion saying their manager had checked in on their health and wellbeing
- 45% of people in June were continuing to feel nervous about returning to the office with only 55% saying they had been given adequate information (and only 44% saying they had been consulted about returning)
The latest good work index survey published in June 2022 has four themes:
- The great rethink/resignation
- Hybrid working
- Career progression and social mobility
- Relationships and the quality of management
The first two are certainly as a result of the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic with people rethinking career options and wanting more flexible working arrangements to address the imbalance in work life balance that we have seen.
Other findings
More and more research is being conducted into the continual effect of the COVID 19 pandemic on employee experience and engagement.
Let’s look at how we can apply certain theories to test the impact:
Social exchange theory
This theory says that if the cost of the relationship is higher than the rewards, then the relationship may be terminated or abandoned. Restrictions from the pandemic lessened our ability to have positive social experiences at work, so we are in a psychological deficit and our relationships with managers and co-workers are impacted, unless interventions are put into place to rectify this as people return to the workplace, whether physically or virtually.
Job demands – resources model
This is like a set of scales where we balance our job demands with the resources that we have. A lack of resources (support, autonomy, feedback) can lead to more strain and lower motivation. Work engagement in some ways have suffered through the pandemic with an increase in job demands which creates mental, emotional, and physical strain – but where the support and autonomy is in place this increased motivation and delivered better organisational outcomes.
- The depletion effects on people during the pandemic included:
- Anxiety about catching COVID 19
- Disruption to home life
- Restricted movement causing lack of social interaction
- Work disruption due to extra regulations and PPE equipment
- Societal change at an uncomfortable pace
- Feeling an unfair exposure – depending on nature of work
- Precariousness
- Isolation, fragmentation, and confusion
- Feeling of burnout
- Personality differences in the ability to cope
Again, all these reinforce that we all experience things differently
- Older people were looking like they were coping better than younger. This is possibly linked to lifespan developmental perspective – as they are older, they have been through more change and are therefore better equipped with coping mechanisms to enable them to bounce back quicker – they could be said to be more emotionally resilient and emotionally intelligent.
- Women were reporting lower productivity than men during the pandemic. There was a shift back to traditional roles for men and women which could be the cause of this impact on employee experience and employee engagement.
What all this shows us is that experience was different for different people dung the pandemic. Leaders and HR professionals need to continue working on:
- Building on the trust gained
- Building resilience to manage change
- Personalising the employee experience
You need to understand what a great employee experience looks like in your organisation in order to create more good days at work.
If you want to hear more about the impact of COVID on engagement and experience or where to start in understanding what employee experience looks like in your organisation, we would love to hear from you so please drop us a hello.
