The pandemic took the lives of over 200,000 people in the UK, and irreversibly changed many aspects of life; successive lockdowns rocked the economy, shutting down all but the most vital work. Employers are still struggling to get to grips with these changes, according to research from the Chartered Institute for Professional Development (CIPD).

The extreme stress of the pandemic forced many people to examine their relationship to work. CIPD statistics show that in 2024, 47% of UK employees said they saw work as ‘just about the money’, up from 38% in 2019, while only 51% said they would work harder than needed to help their employer, down from 57% in 2019.

The change in attitudes towards work has most visibly manifested as a struggle to retain older workers who decided, in the wake of the pandemic, to accelerate their retirement plans.

A 2022 report by the House of Lords’ Economic Affairs Committee, 'Where have all the workers gone?', found a significant increase in the rate of retirement for people aged 50-64. A combination of retirees’ strong financial security – 78% owned their own home outright, disengagement from work, and stress-related concerns meant these people had “no desire to work, and [did] not expect to work again.”

“That target retirement date of 67, or the state pension, just isn’t something people aim for anymore,” Adrian Steele, managing director of Mercian Labels, told Printweek.

“The majority are planning to retire in their late 50s or early 60s, if they are able to – and if not, they don’t have any retirement plan at all. They’ll just go until they can’t anymore.

“I think over the next decade, it’ll become an increasing issue. When you have people you would have thought would stay in the business to the end of their career [looking to retire], you’re going to have to bring succession planning to the fore. That window of optimum, fully productive, fully-trained workers is narrower now than it was 10 years ago.”

The need to work flexibly under duress of pandemic regulations also accelerated the adoption of flexible working times and locations. By March 2023, 60% of workers had flexible working hours arrangements, up from 54% in 2019, and in 2025 just 9% of employers do not allow any form of hybrid work.

“Society has certainly shifted,” Steele added.

“When you’re recruiting now, there is an expectation in certain roles that the default is to have some degree of flexible or home working, and that was never the case before Covid.”

Zoe Deadman, managing director of Cornwall’s KCS Print, told Printweek that hybrid had become her company’s default for roles that allowed it.

“We’ve also gained a better understanding of work/life balance, and there’s definitely more demand for it, which has led us to adapting our working patterns and shifts to help our staff,” she said.

“Of course, there’s also far more use of remote working tools such as video calls and shared mailboxes, too.”

Businesses have had to change their approach to suppliers as well as staff. Supply-chain resilience, once a given in the time of ‘just-in-time’ deliveries and run-down stock levels, has become a major part of doing business, Deadman added.

“We’ve definitely learned to build more resilience into the company, to give flexibility in turbulent times,” she said. 

“We’re definitely more focused now on protecting our cash, too, to ensure that we aren’t overly reliant on credit lines. We’ve found it massively important to ensure an excellent working relationship with suppliers, as well, as they are the be-all and end-all of a business.”

Supply chain security has even become an important part of winning work, according to Steele.

“Covid, in combination with the UPM paper strike in 2022, has led people to be much more fearful around resilience,” he said, mentioning a definite rise in resilience’s importance when tendering for work.

“There’s an increasing expectation from customers that your disaster recovery plans are robust and cut the mustard – they’re not theoretical anymore. And that’s true even for a business of our size [£10m turnover, 70 employees]. Pre-Covid, that kind of expectation would only have existed for a company that had hundreds of employees, but now it’s just a permanent feature of business.”

For companies, however, some of the most acute pressures have been financial. Successive lockdowns put enormous pressure on firms despite financial lifelines like the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) and furlough payments. Today, some companies are struggling to repay those loans. 

The industry lost 40% of its order book in the first lockdown alone, according to BPIF estimates, with web offset and long-run sheetfed printers particularly badly affected.

“The overall debt levels in our industry are still the highest they have ever been, and we’re still living with the consequences of that,” Brendan Perring, general manager of the IPIA, told Printweek.

To Perring, the most meaningful change brought by the pandemic has been its acceleration of a much longer-term trend towards automation, thanks to the uncertainty over labour supply.

“Even with the furlough scheme, suddenly print businesses – especially the medium- and larger-sized ones – saw the need to have systems that were much, much more automated,” he said.

“Pre-Covid, a lot of mid-sized print businesses, because they didn’t want to make that capital investment, were still running quite inefficient setups compared to what was theoretically possible. There were a lot of offline finishing systems that would require a good few human beings to move print from one area to another to finish it, and there were still quite a few manual data gathering or information systems being used.

“But once furlough hit, and our breadbasket sectors of hospitality, retail and leisure closed down, many print businesses had no choice but to put lots of their staff on furlough.”

With furlough, came pressure to “achieve the same level of productivity, by embracing end-to-end automation,” he added.

“Businesses didn’t have a choice. And I think the saddest thing for me is that a lot of that human experience, and craft skill, left the industry over Covid because they were put on furlough, but were never brought back to work because businesses understood they could run a lot more lean with many fewer people.

“That was a trend that would have taken 10 years to come to fruition, but it was compressed into two. And now, if you go into any business in our membership that employs 50 or more people, their focus is on AI technology, software and hardware – automating everything possible from the point of order to the print going on a lorry.”