‘The People Issue’

At HR Grapevine towers, when we sat down to discuss what forces were acting upon the people function, and what we would have to cover in our magazine throughout 2020, we didn’t envisage that a deadly novel coronavirus would be one of them. Yet the pandemic has dramatically changed the nature of work and the business landscape in a way few of us would have predicted just a short while ago.

It’s important to keep this disruption in context. The fight that all health services, families, individuals and governments are currently in – to keep numbers of cases down and as many fit and healthy as possible – is the most crucial thing right now. However, around this fight, work and life will be attempting to go on as best it can. Households finding new patterns of life, and leaders and executives finding what ‘business as usual’ actually means.

For HR, by now, the role should be clear – even if all the pathways through this crisis aren’t. Exist for your people. Before the crisis, the strategies you were working on, to deal with transformative forces such as digital ways of working and the changing nature of employer-employee relationships, should’ve been conducted with your workforce in mind regardless. The same is true now.

Which is why some of the HR stories and expertise contained in this issue are probably more educative now than they would’ve been had COVID-19 never came to be. Inside this month’s cover feature, Head of People Tara Mansfield talks about Monzo’s digital culture and keeping on top of employee mental health, topics that some organisations might be dealing with for the first time during this crisis. There’s also an interview with a leading HRD on how to ensure remote working is done well, and there’s a feature on whether HR should put people or the business first during difficult times.

Stay safe and, as ever, enjoy.

Daniel Cave - Head of Content