The “golden age” is over: part of the company that has employed hundreds of employees during quarantine is abandoning them

The number of employees decreased by almost one hundred.

In late March, the number of customer orders increased tenfold with the start of the quarantine in Barbora, owned by Maxima LT, which, according to company representatives at the time, also required the use of personnel services.

However, it is evident that as the quarantine is eased today, the number of employees in the company is also decreasing.

According to the latest Sodra data, the company had 756 insured employees on May 9, but after more than a couple of weeks, on May 25, this number dropped to almost a hundred, to 666 employees.

Andrius Mikalauskas, director of the electronic store for food and everyday items Barbora, confirmed that the flow of orders in the company has decreased and that the company recently said goodbye to some of its employees.

“After the changes were implemented and the large wave of orders, which was at the beginning of the quarantine, decreased, demand slowed. However, we had planned this in advance: we accepted a large number of additional people for that period more intense.

A significant number of people who came to us came temporarily from businesses that had difficulties during quarantine and were no longer able to support their employees during this period.

We hope that by hiring additional employees to work at Barbora during this period, we have enabled them to maintain a stable income and at least partially compensate for the losses caused by the temporary or permanent loss of employment due to quarantine, “he said.

“As the quarantine decreases and the order flow stabilizes, we say goodbye to some of the temporary employees.

We hope that when Lithuanian companies gradually revive their activities and life returns to its own level, these employees will be able to return to their previous jobs, “said the representative.

Go back to work for your companies

Aušra Delonaitė, Chief of Staff of Dpd Lietuva, which is in charge of package delivery, also said that as the company resolved the temporarily increased need for employees through temporary employment agencies and offered fixed-term employment contracts to people who temporarily lost them, some employees also leave the company.

“Some employees are already returning to their companies and naturally finish their temporary work with us,” he said.

True, according to her, today the workload is gradually stabilizing, but it is still higher than it was before quarantine, so the company still has a larger number of employees than before the sudden increase in demand.

When asked if the company is still looking for new people today, A. Delonaitė said that, as usual, they are still looking because of the natural change. True, he noted that while quarantine conditions are improving, emails continue to work in high-risk areas and have to follow strict rules at all times.

“I have no doubt that this period will change some of the principles of work organization in companies: the office will no longer be the only place to organize work, working time will also become a more flexible concept.

We also evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking. We see that the quality of work and results in many cases not only do not suffer, but also improve, but there is still a need to find ways to better meet the social communication needs of employees, form teams, promote unity and the loyalty. This will probably be one of the most important management problems after quarantine when I return to normal operation, “he said.

Fixed-term contracts expire

Raimonda Strazdauskaitė, head of communications at Pigu.lt, told Delfi that in March-May, due to the increased demand, the company also hired more than 100 new employees, with whom indefinite and temporary employment contracts were signed. .

He explained that it could be concluded that the need for new employees during quarantine had increased by almost 20% in total compared to the usual indicators, and since e-commerce is still growing and the workload is not decreasing, so far the company has not plan to reduce, there is a natural change.

“Quarantine has increased the demand for certain professionals, but today, it can be said, there is a natural change.

Some employees, such as chefs, taxi drivers, who have worked in logistics, leave and return to their previous jobs, so we are looking for new employees, “said the specialist about expired fixed-term contracts.

Getting back on track

Rita Karavaitienė, director of CV-Online Marketing, said that although there were a number of companies that had started and stopped recruiting processes before the quarantine began, in the last week of April, in May, the number of offers began to increase again.

“It is just that the market has returned to plan today, what kind of employees will be needed. It can be said that we are returning to a stable situation,” he said.

According to him, the need for customer service specialists is coming back, and the number of job offers for marketing and human resources specialists is increasing.

“IT, as well as there was a great demand for workers, construction, transportation, has maintained stable stability.

The field of tourism is still stagnant and it is not yet the case that many ads have appeared, so there is still a strong stagnation in this field. We recorded a jump in email search in the second third week of quarantine, and now the rest of the usual search for employees, plus individual ads, “he said.