There’s a lot of speculation about what working life will be like in the future. One option is a hybrid arrangement, with more of us working at least part of the time from home. Some large corporates are insisting that their employees must work from company offices once the pandemic has eased, but setting aside speculation about the pros and cons of working from home or office, whatever your work environment, everyone is affected by the two intertwined constants in life: pressure and change.

Evolution is often thought to be a process of trial and error. In fact, it’s the other way round: evolution proceeds by error and trial. Every cell in your body contains your DNA, which is replicated whenever a cell divides. Inevitably, in the countless divisions there will be occasional errors in transcription – mutations. Those errors are then ‘tested’ to find out whether or not they confer an advantage over the unmutated form.

Here’s the bad news: real GDP in the UK dipped to -10.3% in 2020, and unemployment rose from 3.7% to 5.4% across 2019/2020. Similar grim figures have emerged across the globe as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic – GDP growth for the EU was -7.4%, and unemployment rose from 3.7% to 8.9% in the USA – and with the inevitable emergence of viral mutations there is still a hard road ahead. The (sort-of) good news is that vaccines were produced in record time, and approved just as quickly in many countries. The dark cloud behind the silver lining is that the availability of vaccines will for some time be limited, and will disproportionately benefit rich countries at a cost to poorer ones: unlike trade, altruism is definitely not global.

Races are run over a variety of distances, but if we were asked to name the shortest and the longest we’d likely say the 100-metre sprint and the marathon. In much the same way, predictions about the duration of the Covid-19 pandemic have ranged from it petering out by the end of the year to being with us permanently. Whatever the outcome, though, there won’t be a rapid end without an effective vaccine, which is some way off, so the world is in for a marathon rather than a sprint.

Sprinting demands a short but massive burst of energy. For corporates the energy was provided partly by . . .

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?