The spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, aside from huge human and financial losses, has given a strong acceleration towards the adoption of Smart Working globally.

The sudden and forced transition to this model, without any prior preparation, made its potential and its limits emerge in this emergency.

ESCP Business School detected the need for Human Resources managers to meet other professionals to share thoughts and ideas, to discuss best practices and critical aspects, in order to find possible points of improvement.

Chiara Succi, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, with the ESCP Turin Campus Corporate Relations team, organised a virtual round table bringing together more than 20 HR Managers from the ESCP corporate network, to discuss relevant “hot” topics in these challenging times.

The event, moderated by Prof Succi, aimed to share experiences and lessons learned in the COVID-19 era and start a fruitful discussion between HR managers to understand the main implications.

This emergency represents an opportunity to observe how people react to disruptive events. Out of their comfort zone and in this unprecedented situation, employees and managers developed many new soft skills, while they were facing challenges on a professional, personal and social level.

Many organisations sent a survey to their employees to understand how they feel about working from home and how they expect the organisation of their work will change in the future.

The participants identified the key elements that will characterize the "new normal", as such work flexibility, agile teams and a learning culture.

The feedback from the group gave everyone a great picture of the current situation, offering a few suggestions on what to do to reshape the organisation and implement best practices as we head into a brand-new era for human resources management.

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