'Treat it like a disease': Corporate long COVID is stunting employee productivity

There's a new buzzword for the decline in productivity some organizations have experienced in the wake of the COVID-19, and it has a familiar ring to it: corporate long COVID.

Only 32% of American employees are happy and engaged in their work, according to a recent poll from Gallup. This lag in employee sentiment, otherwise known as corporate long COVID,  includes the loss of skills, customer dissatisfaction, lost sales and gaps in employee performance. 

"COVID kind of accelerated certain inevitable outcomes about the way we do business, and at the same time it disrupted certain areas," says Samer Saab, CEO of employee insights platform Explorance. "The main premise is that we can treat it as a disease — we can diagnose it once we know what the problem is and where exactly it needs to be addressed."

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According to Saab, the problem stems from the disruption of the workforce's work-life balance. As companies shifted from managing in-person workforces to doing business virtually, they were simultaneously forced to deal with the Great Resignation. That all led to employers hastily replacing talent in an effort to preserve numbers, rather than slowly identifying the best course of action. 

"As companies measure the new skill gap — skills lost due to high turnover rates — most have lost anywhere from four to seven years," he says. "What that means is, two years ago, companies were seven years ahead in leadership competency — and they lost it. And developing specific programs for their leaders to make up for lost time and bridge that gap could be very hard to do." 

Treating this workplace phenomenon like a disease, he says, means starting with its symptoms. 

"One of the biggest symptoms is the Great Resignation," he says. "People are leaving because of ineffective management. The second one is elasticity of time — projects that used to take four people two months to do now take 10 people five months to do. Third, you see decreased performance, which translates into decreased profitability. These are very early-stage signals that things are starting to cost employers much more to do than it did two years ago." 

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Saab suggests approaching the solution in phases. Phase one, he says, is to measure and quantify the issue. Embrace information already at an organization's fingertips, whether reviewing Glassdoor reviews of company culture or simply asking department heads to identify areas of the organization that have weakened. 

"You don't know if you have a problem if you don't measure your data," Saab says. "And you don't want to wait until your profit starts eroding to realize you have an issue." 

Phase two is to work as a team to choose what challenge the company wants to prioritize, he explains. No one can solve more than one problem at a time, and communication between employers and employees will be critical to streamline the process and get productivity levels back to target.

"Companies need to be patient with employees and find that common ground where they'll acknowledge that, as a company, they're behind, but they'll work together and strategically to solve that problem," he says. "As an employer, it's not just your job to make my employees perform. Your job as an employer is to make them feel empowered."