Research & insights from the pandemic years
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
There are moments in organisational life that reveal something true – about leadership, about people, about what actually matters when the pressure is on. The pandemic was one of them.
Between 2020 and 2021, we ran a series of workshops and research sessions with leaders from across sectors and geographies – trying to make sense, in real time, of what was working and what wasn't. The three papers below capture what we found. They were written in the moment and they read that way deliberately: they're a record of what leaders were actually doing and saying during an extraordinary period, not a retrospective tidy-up. We've kept them as they are. The human dynamics they describe haven't gone away.
What's worked well in COVID-19 — that you want to maintain in the future
April 2020 Based on a cross-sector workshop with 30+ leaders from multiple countries
In April 2020, just weeks into the first lockdown, we brought together more than thirty leaders from different organisations, functions and countries and asked them a simple question: what's actually working – and what do you want to hold onto when this is over?
What came back was striking. Leaders were stepping up for their people in ways they hadn't before – listening more, communicating more honestly, trusting more. Hierarchies had flattened. Silos had started to break down. People were learning new skills and finding, to their surprise, that they were more productive and more connected than they'd expected.
The questions are as relevant now as they were then. Which of those habits did we actually keep? And for the ones that slipped – is it too late to bring them back?
Effective team working remotely
October 2020 Based on a cross-sector workshop with global organisational leaders
By autumn 2020, the initial adrenaline of remote working had worn off. Leaders were grappling with something harder: how do you build and sustain a high-performing team when you can't be in the same room?
This paper tackles three specific scenarios that our workshop participants wanted to work through: onboarding a new team member remotely, setting up a new team to perform effectively and maintaining and developing an existing team over time. It's practical and detailed – the kind of resource you'd reach for if you were actually facing one of those situations.
Remote and hybrid working are now simply how many organisations operate. The challenges this paper documents – around connection, trust, wellbeing, equality of experience and what high performance even means in a distributed environment – haven't disappeared. If anything, they've become more entrenched.
Turning lockdown healthy practices into 'how we do things around here'
July 2020 White paper based on cross-sector global research
This is perhaps the most forward-looking of the three papers. Written in July 2020, it asks: if COVID-19 has forced us into better habits – more empathetic leadership, greater trust, faster decision-making, stronger cross-functional collaboration – how do we make sure those habits outlast the crisis that created them?
The paper works through five themes in detail: leaders focusing on their people, leaders trusting people to perform, being lean and decisive, breaking down organisational silos and embracing new learning and technology. For each, it sets out the specific behaviours required and the practical steps to embed them – not as a response to a pandemic but as a permanent shift in how things get done.
The organisations that treated COVID as a genuine moment of cultural reset – rather than something to recover from and return to normal – are the ones that emerged from it with something worth keeping. This paper is a useful prompt for asking honestly: did we?
The pandemic surfaced something important about how people lead and how organisations function. What did it reveal in yours – and how much of it are you still holding onto?
If these papers prompt something worth exploring – whether that’s a conversation about culture, leadership or what it takes to make change stick – we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch here.
These papers were produced by Sticky Change between April and October 2020, based on cross-sector workshops and research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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