Five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, employers’ emergency playbooks have evolved

Few things have aged HR pros more quickly than Covid-19.

Five years ago this week, the World Health Organization declared the then-emerging virus a pandemic. The world changed in practically the blink of an eye, forcing businesses to scramble to keep up.

“Very few organizations had a pandemic playbook in their strategy planning, where they had a binder they could pull out and be like, ‘Okay, so here’s what we do.’ It had to be made up on the fly. It had to be adapted,” Emily Rose McRae, senior director analyst at Gartner, told HR Brew. “You could have had preparation for supply chain disruptions, you could have had preparation for: ‘We need to shut down this factory,’ and you still wouldn't have been prepared for that scale and the global element of it.”

Stay-at-home mandates ushered in unprecedented spikes in remote work—and unemployment claims, as workers were laid off and furloughed—while healthcare and other essential industries had to navigate working in-person in dangerous environments.

And functions that had previously been overlooked as strategic players were thrust into the spotlight—including HR.

“All of our clients, in the HR and in the comp. and benefits space automatically got turned into Covid response teams within their employers. A lot of the burden fell on them,” Gord Frost, a partner and global rewards solution leader at Mercer, told HR Brew. “I think it shoved them into the limelight, for sure, certainly in organizations that had a lot of frontline workers.”

New planning. The pandemic forced employers to develop emergency response plans. Since then, they’ve paid dividends, coming into play, for example, following reports of Mpox outbreaks in 2022 and 2024.

“There was quite a bit of concern. And what was good is that…we were immediately able to jump on our plans, on all our processes and be prepared, if that had, God forbid, become an outbreak of any sort of scale similar to Covid,” Tim Eldridge, global head of health, safety, security, environment and quality at real estate giant JLL, told HR Brew. “We had processes, we had communication channels, we had the ability to put in contingency as well. Fortunately, we didn’t need to do that. But I think that’s what a lot of organizations have learned, that we can now build on that experience.”

That planning has extended beyond virus outbreaks. For example, employers have implemented emergency response plans for severe weather events which have become more common because of climate change. In some cases, policies created in response to the pandemic—like flexible work or emergency leave policies—have also become part of organizations’ broader emergency playbooks.

“A lot of employers developed Covid leave policies during the height of Covid, and I think a lot of those policies, most of them, are no longer on the books as Covid policies,” Rich Fuerstenberg, a senior partner in Mercer’s health and benefits practice, said. “Employers are keeping that emergency leave as policies on their books that they can break out when the appropriate time comes, because these events seem to be happening more and more frequently, not necessarily a pandemic, but crises that affect broad numbers of employees, geographically or on a more national basis.”

Mind the middle. While some companies have focused on creating policies and strategies to address challenges, others “that have not done as good a job” are leaving those challenges up to managers to figure out, Frost said.

“There’s been a lot more pressure put on managers to manage these situations, which are hard. And they’re not situations that a manager would have been expected to deal with pre-Covid,” Frost said. Requiring them to respond to situations they are ill-equipped to handle can frustrate employees and hurt culture. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that “improving people managers’ skills” was the top priority for HR leaders for 2025, according to Mercer’s global talent trends report.

“We’ve never seen that on the list of top HR priorities,” he said. “Finding ways to actually take that off the manager’s plate, and finding a way to manage these circumstances in a more consistent and more strategic way is probably the key to success.”