HR Challenges During a Pandemic: Q&A with Adele Rom

When COVID hit in 2020, HR teams had about 72 hours to figure out how to run a company with no office, no precedent, and no plan. Every assumption about how work happened — physical presence, in-person communication, on-site benefits — collapsed at once. The question was not just how to keep the lights on, but whether the people systems companies had built were actually built to last.

We asked Adele Rom what People leaders were actually dealing with. At the time she was Founder of ARC, a boutique HR consulting firm. She has since served as CPO at Riot Games, JP Morgan Chase, Reformation, and Clique Brands. She is now a Senior Partner at Evolution and an AllVoices advisor. Few People leaders had the vantage point she did.

What were the top HR priorities as offices looked to reopen?

Most executives were thinking about the physical logistics — ventilation, desk spacing, return-to-office timelines. HR was thinking about something harder: how do you bring people back to a workplace that had already fundamentally changed how they thought about work?

Adele broke it into six areas. All of them are still live issues today.

How do you maintain company culture without an office?

“Culture, culture, culture. It’s what anchors people, keeps them connected, creates a sense of community, and is often the glue that keeps companies healthy when times get tough.”

Most culture programs in 2020 had been built around physical co-presence — the office as the container. When the container disappeared, a lot of companies discovered their culture was thinner than they thought. The perks had been doing work that values never actually did.

She split companies into two groups: those with strong culture, who needed to protect it, and those with weak culture, who had an unexpected opening.

“The pandemic can be a silver lining. It gives HR leaders a chance to sit down with the C-suite and ask: what has not been working, and what do we want to change?”

That framing mattered. HR teams that treated COVID as purely a continuity problem missed a real strategic window. The companies that came out strongest used the disruption to strip away what was performative and double down on what actually built trust.

Three things that kept culture intact for distributed teams:

Scheduled, consistent leadership communication, not just crisis updates
Small rituals that did not require an office: weekly wins, async check-ins, team channels
Values articulated clearly enough that employees could connect to them from anywhere

The teams that held together fastest were the ones already building cultures of listening before the crisis hit.

How does remote work change talent strategy and hiring?

“Talent strategy will need to be reimagined. What I love about this is how it is going to positively play out for diversity and inclusion. It really opens up the workforce and candidate pools.”

This was the most optimistic thing Adele said — and it turned out to be right. Geography had always functioned as a silent filter on who could access good jobs. You needed to be near a major metro, able to afford city rents, untethered enough to relocate. Remote work removed that filter overnight.

“The marketing candidate in Omaha and the college grad in Fargo now have the same shot as someone already in a major metro. Great talent is wherever people are, not wherever your office happens to be.”

This shift unlocked real DEI gains for companies willing to build the systems to support distributed teams. It also meant that companies that could not adapt their hiring and onboarding processes to remote were now competing with companies that could.

How should HR support employees who are caregivers?

“The pandemic put a spotlight on family care. People are juggling parenting, caring for aging parents, and demanding jobs, all from home at the same time.”

Adele flagged this as one of the most structurally underappreciated problems HR was dealing with. Companies had built benefits packages around in-office workers. When offices closed, the programs broke — not gradually but immediately.

“This is a critical issue. HR leaders have a responsibility to get ahead of it. It is one area where AllVoices adds real value. It gives people a private, safe way to raise concerns about their situation without fear.”

The specific concern Adele named — women leaving the workforce to become primary caregivers — did materialize at scale. Millions of women had their careers set back by years, and many employers were not paying attention until the losses showed up in retention data.

Most employer benefits had been designed for in-office workers. When offices closed, the programs broke:

On-site childcare required a physical location that no longer existed
Subsidized gym memberships stopped working when gyms did
Elder care referral services assumed employees lived near approved providers

The rebuild was not optional. It had to happen fast, with no additional budget, while HR was simultaneously managing return-to-office planning, employee mental health, and a full rewrite of almost every people process.

What do managers need to lead remote teams well?

“Managers are connectors. Companies need to make sure they have invested in the tools and resources managers need to do their jobs well.”

But Adele went further than tools. The tools problem was solvable — Zoom, Slack, async workflows. The harder problem was that managers were being asked to support their teams through one of the most disorienting periods in living memory while simultaneously going through it themselves.

“Companies need to ensure managers are in a healthy space, mentally and physically. Their teams rely on them. It is the whole put-your-oxygen-mask-on-first rule.”

This was where a lot of companies failed. They invested in employee wellbeing programming without accounting for the fact that managers were the primary delivery mechanism. A burned-out manager cannot run meaningful one-on-ones, cannot spot disengagement early, cannot hold the team together under pressure. Supporting managers was not optional — it was the highest-leverage investment a company could make.

What managers specifically needed in 2020:

Clear guidance on what they could decide without escalating to HR
Training on running one-on-ones without in-person cues
Permission to say they did not know, without it undermining their credibility
Regular check-ins from their own managers, not just from HR

Structuring effective one-on-ones was one of the most concrete things HR could actually hand managers during that period.

Why does internal communication break down during a crisis?

“Internal communications is often an afterthought. Messaging gets rushed out and no one owns it. Communication connects employees to culture and strategy. When it breaks down, both suffer.”

This was not a new problem — it just became impossible to ignore. The informal communication infrastructure of an office had been doing enormous amounts of work that nobody had formalized. The water-cooler conversation where you heard about the reorg. The hallway moment where your manager mentioned something was coming. None of that existed remotely, and nothing was ready to replace it.

Her prescription was direct: put internal communication in your OKRs, fund it, and assign clear ownership. If nobody owns it, it does not happen. That is as true in 2026 as it was in 2020.

The same principle applies today — our breakdown of internal communication during uncertainty covers the specifics.

Who owns workplace safety when the threat is invisible?

“Safety is already something HR leads on. COVID expands that scope. But accountability here is shared. It includes Facilities, Operations, Legal, and the executive team. It is a shared responsibility.”

This was a harder conversation than it sounds. Workplace safety in 2020 meant something it had never meant before: an invisible, airborne pathogen that nobody fully understood, spreading through the exact mechanism companies had built their cultures around — in-person presence. HR was not equipped to make epidemiological decisions. What Adele was saying, in practice, was that nobody could lead this alone, and the instinct to put it all on HR was going to fail.

What made these priorities so hard to act on?

Knowing what to do and having the resources to do it are different problems. Adele named three structural barriers that made every item on that list harder than it should have been.

Why HR budgets are always the first to get cut

“HR budgets are often the first to get cut and are regularly stretched thin. To manage what I have described above, there has to be real funding.”

This is one of the most consistent structural failures in how companies manage people functions. HR gets asked to solve retention, culture, engagement, and wellbeing — and then gets its budget cut when things get hard. Every item on Adele’s list required investment. Without it, even strong People teams were solving a five-alarm crisis with a garden hose.

What happens when there is no HR playbook for a crisis?

“Normally a CPO can look outside and ask: what are other companies doing? What is tried and true? That is not possible here. With COVID there is no playbook. Mistakes will be made. Everyone needs patience and empathy.”

This was genuinely new territory. Not a recession, not a natural disaster, not a PR crisis. A simultaneous shutdown of every office everywhere, indefinitely. There was no prior art to borrow from, no benchmarking to do, no conference session on how this had been handled before. HR leaders were making consequential decisions in real time with incomplete information, and they needed the organizations they worked for to understand that.

How do you retain employees who are rethinking their whole lives?

“People are stepping back and looking at their priorities, health, and relationships. Trying to engage and retain people who are also re-evaluating how they want to live is a real challenge.”

Standard retention strategies assume people want what they wanted before the disruption. In 2020, many of them did not. Compensation, title, career ladder — these mattered less when people were questioning whether the entire deal they had made with work still made sense. That made every existing playbook less reliable than usual — which is exactly what played out in the Great Resignation retention crisis two years later.

How can HR leaders be a source of stability when nobody has answers?

“Bring humanity and compassion to work. Be authentic, honest, and transparent. Psychological safety is tied to trust. Even if answers are hard to hear, people would rather know the truth than fill in the blanks themselves. Now is not the time to hide in your virtual office. Show up. Be human.”

This is harder than it sounds when you are the one fielding questions you cannot answer. But the point is that uncertainty itself was not the problem — people can handle uncertainty. What they cannot handle is opacity. Leaders who went quiet during COVID, who communicated only when they had good news, burned through trust at exactly the moment they needed it most.

Transparency is not just a cultural value. It is a risk management tool. Employees who trust their leadership raise concerns early, before small problems turn into formal cases. Teams that operate this way show up differently in employee relations KPIs — faster resolution times, higher report rates, fewer escalations.

How can employees raise concerns without risking their jobs?

Most companies offer one channel: talk to your manager. That only works if the manager is not part of the problem — and in a crisis environment where managers are themselves overwhelmed and under-supported, that condition fails more often than it should. Adele was direct about what a real reporting infrastructure looks like.

Why one reporting channel is never enough

“People should feel comfortable going to their manager. But those conversations are often uncomfortable because people do not know how to raise concerns well. Management training helps. So does making sure alternate channels like legal and employee relations are actually approachable.”

The word “approachable” matters here. A lot of organizations have formal escalation paths that employees technically have access to but would never actually use. HR feels institutional. Legal feels nuclear. The result is that employees who have real concerns stay silent because none of the available options feel safe.

Then Adele made the direct case for anonymous reporting:

“AllVoices provides a channel that is completely safe. Because concerns can be anonymous, it gives employees a chance to say: I am not comfortable with something and I want it heard in an unbiased way.”

Anonymity does something structural here that training and culture alone cannot. It removes the calculus of risk from the reporting decision. The employee does not have to trust that their manager will handle the feedback well, or that HR will be discreet, or that there will be no social blowback. They just have to decide whether to surface the concern. AllVoices ran a controlled study on this — the anonymity and reporting rate findings are worth a look.

Four reasons employees stay silent even when they want to speak up:

Fear of retaliation from their manager or team
Doubt that reporting will lead to any real change
Uncertainty about how the process actually works
No channel that feels genuinely private

Anonymous reporting fixes the first and last barriers directly. The other two require a disciplined approach to employee relations case management to solve.

How should HR handle political disagreement about workplace safety rules?

COVID made workplace safety a politically charged topic in a way most HR teams were not prepared for. Mask policies, vaccine requirements, return-to-office mandates — each became a vector for conflict that went far beyond normal workplace disagreement. Adele had a clear framework for cutting through it.

Shift from personal belief to shared responsibility

“Shift the conversation from politics to responsibility. Whether someone thinks COVID is a serious risk is not up to them when it comes to the shared workplace. We know it spreads through close contact. Those are facts. The question is whether we respect our colleagues enough not to expose them. That is it.”

This reframe sidesteps the ideological argument entirely. You do not have to agree on the science. You have to agree on what you owe the people you work with. That is a narrower, more tractable question — and it is the one HR actually has standing to enforce.

This logic holds well past COVID. Any time individual preference runs into shared standards at work, the frame is the same: what do we owe each other?

Where these challenges stand in 2025 and 2026

Five years on, none of Adele’s concerns have gone away. Most have gotten structurally harder. The crisis-mode language is gone, but the underlying problems — budget constraints, manager burnout, inadequate reporting infrastructure, caregiver pressure — are now permanent features of the HR landscape. Here is what the data shows.

Mental health is now the leading driver of employee relations cases

In 2020 this looked like a crisis response problem. By 2025 it is a permanent feature of the job. The mental health spike that HR scrambled to address during COVID never fully receded — it just stopped being headline news.

According to SHRM’s 2025 Workplace Mental Health research, nearly 1 in 3 U.S. workers say their job makes them stressed always or often, and 1 in 4 have considered quitting due to mental health concerns. That is not a pandemic number — that is the baseline.

From Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025:

Only 33% of employees globally say they are thriving
41% reported significant stress the day before they were surveyed
Loneliness at work remains near record highs

The caregiver burnout Adele flagged in 2020 fed directly into those numbers. Women who left the workforce did not all come back, and those who did came back changed.

Hybrid work stuck around but created a new equity problem

Adele was right about geography opening up. Candidates no longer need to relocate. But the equity problem shifted rather than disappeared. The access barrier went away; the visibility barrier stayed.

Proximity bias is the issue now. Employees working remotely consistently report:

Less visibility for promotions and stretch assignments
Weaker relationships with decision-makers who work in the office
Being left out of conversations that happen in person

U.S. employee engagement hit an 11-year low in 2024 according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025. Teams that built deliberate culture practices for distributed work show up very differently in that data than teams that simply moved meetings to video calls.

Anonymous reporting went from progressive to expected

In 2020, Adele’s case for anonymous reporting was forward-looking. By 2025, organizations that rely only on open-door policies are behind. SHRM’s 2025 research on mental health and reporting found that only 13% of employees told their manager their mental health was suffering — meaning the vast majority of concerns go unreported through traditional channels. That gap is exactly what anonymous reporting exists to close.

That is what AllVoices was built to do: get concerns in early, before they escalate into formal complaints or litigation.

ER teams are handling more with the same headcount

Research across the employee relations field consistently shows ER team staffing has been flat for years, while case complexity keeps rising. The budget constraint Adele named in 2020 has not been resolved — and now the caseload includes categories that barely existed pre-pandemic: remote misconduct, hybrid-related equity complaints, mental health accommodations, and the residue of return-to-office conflicts.

What high-performing ER teams do differently today:

Track patterns across cases, not just individual incidents
Set KPIs around resolution time and employee trust, not just case closure
Build intake processes that lower the barrier to reporting
Run regular audits for issues that are not being reported at all

AllVoices is a leading employee relations platform that helps HR teams manage ER cases, workplace investigations, anonymous reporting, and employee feedback.