If you’re an HR manager, 2020 is probably the most challenging time you’ve ever had to deal with. First the pandemic: lockdowns, working from home, Zoom meetings. Then the consequences: a global economic downturn, disappearing markets, redundancies.

Experience of previous shocks like the financial crisis of 2008/9 shows that economies do bounce back, often faster than anticipated, but until that happens there will be much corporate hardship. Resilience is needed more than ever, not just for negotiating the crisis but for moving forward when it recedes. What can you do to help your people adjust to the huge changes affecting the way we work?

We often think of change in relation to the state we’ve changed from to the state we’ve changed to. In my previous blog I shifted the focus to the gap between them: what change is really about is the transition from the one state to the other, and it’s in that space between them that resilience skills are crucial. One of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic will be a significant and possibly prolonged downturn in the global economy, which presents us all with a huge and significant transition: as companies contract or are wound up altogether there will inevitably be redundancies, especially when the buffer of furlough payments are phased out.

We tend to think about change in relation to the states we move to or from: the response to the Covid-19 pandemic is about the freedom before it arrived compared with the restrictions of the lock-down. The key component, though, is the transition. We quite quickly adapt to new situations, and having to work from home or not being able to meet friends becomes the new normal. What may be overlooked is the process of getting from one state to the next, and it’s here that resilience comes into play.

Ordinary workdays are currently a thing of the past as the world grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic. Those of us who can are now having to work from home, but in circumstances not at all like an office. Schools are closed, so the children are at home too, and shopping for daily necessities is a hit-and miss affair: will there be any pasta available? Probably not, as a consequence of needless stockpiling by some shoppers.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are physically almost indistinguishable, other than a small difference in size (chimps tend to be a bit bigger). Where they do differ significantly, however, is in their behaviour, most obviously in the way their societies are structured: chimpanzee groups are patriarchal, governed by a dominant alpha male; bonobo groups are generally ruled by females. The way this plays out in their behaviour is that chimpanzee societies are characterised by aggression. They assert their dominance by fighting or killing rivals, strangers and even young chimps, and beat female chimps in to sexual submission. Bonobo societies, by contrast are a haven of relative peace and cooperation. Sound familiar? If you recognise a chimpanzee manager from your workplace, before you jump to any conclusions let’s first get this into perspective!