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Five years ago, HR professionals were thrust into sniper’s alley with a working world dictated by movement restrictions, a complete overhaul of how to approach physical and mental wellbeing, a rolling out of ‘furlough’ payments and the entering of a new culture of working - both remote and without precedent. HR Grapevine spoke to two HR leaders, one working in the NHS at the time - the other the CPO of a wealth management business when lockdown hit – two different people but one shared experience.
The NHS learned to respond at a pace it hadn’t before during the pandemic:
During the peak of Covid, Nate Price-Whittle, FCIPD, now Associate Director - People Consulting, KPMG UK worked in the NHS at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust with the unenviable task of having responsibility for staff wellbeing. In the summer of 2020, he was further seconded to NHS England to support the regional, London response and if that wasn’t enough, he wrote his dissertation for an MSc in Occupational Psychology in 2021 on the experience of NHS leaders during the pandemic.
“My first memory of when I began to worry about Covid was running a workshop - an increasing number of nurses could not attend. When I asked why this was, the reason given was because they were being fitted for a new, advanced type of mask they might need to start wearing in the clinical setting,” says Price-Whittle.
As Associate Director of Organisational Development and Wellbeing in one of the largest NHS Trusts in the country, Price-Whittle and his team were being increasingly asked to cancel all non-essential training and reduce occurrences of bringing staff from different teams together.
“By the time the country entered lockdown, my whole team had been completely redeployed. My learning and development professionals entered new roles such as working as runners on wards, managing the food and drink donations we were receiving and helping to maintain clinical records.”
Whittle-Price found that his days were spent calling clinical staff who were symptomatic, and therefore at home and asking them to drive to their nearest IKEA, which at that time was the first mass Covid testing centres.
