What characterises companies that are doing well during the Corona crisis is that they are companies
where top leadership has managed to maintain a constant stream of information at the right times and
with the right information, and where they were good at handling it quickly – especially during the first phases of the crisis.
Everything indicates that Denmark is one of the first countries to come out of the crisis.
We are not out of it yet, but we are certainly among the first to come out of it,
which gives Danish companies a unique opportunity to be the first companies to learn from the Corona crisis.
There are three things that I think we have learned from COVID-19 in relation to leadership and HR. First and foremost
its that the immediate leader, in his/her capacity as immediate leader, seems to have done really well.
Employees indicate that their leaders have been present
as well as understanding relative to the challenges they had to face, and they showed empathy.
No. 2 is that it seems that when we look at data, we see that female leaders in particular have been best at handling distance leadership,
and they were the ones who managed to generated the greatest engagement among the employees.
The last thing is that, despite the fact that leaders have done really well,
they have acted based on gut feelings and instinct.
However, we can see that the new way of working and the new world actually requires an upgrade for all leaders.
They need to learn to navigate in the new world, and not just manage based on guy feelings.
Corona has introduced a new world where employees have lots of desires about how to work going forward.
Desires that require new solutions.
This means that HR has to sit down and figure out
the working conditions, rules, and frameworks that we need for the employees going forward.
What makes it incredibly hard for HR is that there are massive differences when we look at the age,
seniority, and nationality of the employees, which makes HR’s job that much more difficult.
So, right now, HR faces the challenge of finding a solution that covers everyone, and this is difficult to do because there are so many preferences.