Almost every business has felt the financial impact the coronavirus has made due to restrictions and lockdowns. Now, as states begin to reopen after being on lockdown for a couple months, businesses are looking to get up and running again. Many companies are having trouble getting employees back to work and finding enough applicants to fill their open positions, making it hard for them to restart. For companies that remained open during statewide lockdowns, many of their employees started working from home, to ensure everyone remained safe and healthy.
Now that restrictions have been lifted, these companies would like to bring their employees back into the office. Even with the ease of restriction, nearly 72% of employees are hesitant to return to the office according to a survey conducted by Monster. A lot of hesitation comes from employees not knowing what procedures their company has put in place due to the virus. These employees are concerned about having to maintain social distance from a co-worker, how clean the workplace is, traveling to work if they use public transportation, and if common areas in their office building will be overcrowded.
Knowing the hesitation employees are showing, some companies are looking into bringing some of their staff back to the office and keep a majority of their employees working from home to help maintain social distancing guidelines. Employees have gotten comfortable working from home over the past couple months and are realizing just how feasible it is to work from home. It is becoming the new reality that employees may want to continue working from home. According to a survey conducted by Monster, nearly 45.5% of employees are more willing to work from home than before the coronavirus outbreak and of those respondents, nearly 42% are exploring working from home permanently.
Along with bringing employees back to the office, many companies are still looking to fill open positions. Some are finding success in filling their position but a large majority of businesses are having trouble getting applicant’s overall. With the shortage of applicants or qualified candidates, businesses are competing with one another to hire the top candidates.
With the shortage of applicants, businesses are taking notice of a new applicant pool that they have not seen before. These applicants are high school and college aged students looking to find work, since their classes are online and extracurricular activities have likely been cancelled due to the coronavirus. Another problem businesses are facing is the extra unemployment payments. Entry-level candidates who would normally apply to those roles are not doing so. For these positions, businesses are used to seeing hundreds of applications a week but now they aren’t even getting 20 applications.
Many businesses, who still have employees working from home and are suffering from a reduced applicant pool, are worried about their future. Businesses need to start looking at what their employees want to see from the company to feel comfortable to return to the office. If a business is having trouble finding new applicants to fill open positions, they may want to start looking in new, unfamiliar areas they have never looked before to get applicants like social media, local groups or agencies. Everyone is trying their best to keep employees working but the impact of the coronavirus is not making it easy.
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