Companies in the UK were not sure how they were going to get through the pandemic with the number of jobs that they were losing. Additionally, the lockdown and the first five months of people told to stay indoors, for their safety, lead to a lot of instability with the markets. With the instability came job loss and companies were not sure how they were going to hold on to the number of people they had initially hired, which meant that there were a lot of people who were not sure about the future. With all these changes and the rules laid out for the people, companies were not sure what their future had in store.
Fortunately, for most of the businesses in the UK, the Government put together a furlough plan wherein they paid 80% of all salaries of the employees within a company, with the company only having to pay the difference. Even with these rules that were a lot of companies that were laying people off since they still could not meet the targets that they had initially set and that was quite challenging.
To protect people from the COVID 19 pandemic, companies began working on various rules to keep their employees productive, while also reducing the amount of social interaction between people. One of the new trends followed was remote working, which meant that companies had their employees checking in remotely, usually from home, so they did not endanger other employees or get infected themselves.
While there was a small percentage of companies who were doing this well before the pandemic, there were others who started working on onboarding the new process as soon as the COVID lockdown began. There are a series of businesses and fields that cannot support these changes, some of them as significant as health care.
Others include construction, hospitality, and many hands-on jobs like mechanical work like fixing vehicles, carpentry, or electrical work. While these jobs have to be handle in person, even these companies through that it would make sense to take as much of their work online. While they could not have the bulk of their work online, they allowed for the registration, coordination of the basics, and other small jobs online.
Most companies were finding that their productivity was significantly lower with work handled online, but was better than nothing, which is what the initial days of the pandemic looked like.
Another significant change that companies started working with was the fact that they began handling background checks for all the people who worked within. With the large number of people leaving the company, it only made sense that they wanted to make sure that they could trust the ones who were sticking around.
The most common background check was the CRB check which can be handled by anyone without any hassles. If the employer needed more information and wanted to know about criminal cases in the past, they could up their background check and go through the DBS check. One of the perks of the latter is that it could be done through the internet as well, making it convenient. It just needs the applicant to prove that they are conducting the test on an employee or a prospective employee.