Five years later: how Covid changed the printing industry

The pandemic took the lives of more than 200,000 people in the United Kingdom and has irreversibly changed many aspects of life; Successive locks have shaken the economy, closing everything except the most vital work. Employers are still struggling to go to these changes, according to research by the Chartered Institute for Professional Development (CIPD).

The extreme stress of the pandemic has forced many people to examine their relationship at work. CIPD statistics show that in 2024, 47% of British employees said they considered work as much of about money, compared to 38% in 2019, while only 51% said they would work harder than necessary to help their employer, compared to 57% in 2019.

The change of attitudes towards work has been visibly manifested as a struggle to keep the elderly workers who decided, following the pandemic, to accelerate their retirement plans.

A report in 2022 of the Economic Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Lords, “Where did all workers have left?”, Found a significant increase in the retirement rate of people aged 50 to 64. A combination of retirees to high financial security 78% had their own house, disengagement from work and stress concerns meant that these people had no desire to work, and [did] Do not expect to work again.

This target retirement date of 67, or the state pension, is no longer something that people are targeting, said Adrian Steele, Managing Director of Mercian Labels, said Printing week.

The majority planned to retire in the late 1950s or early 1960s, if they were capable and if not, they have no retirement plan. They will just go until they can no longer.

I think that during the next decade, it will become a growing problem. When you would have people, you would have thought of staying in the business until the end of their career [looking to retire]You will have to highlight the succession planning. This completely productive and fully trained optimal workers window is narrower now than it was 10 years ago.

The need to work flexibly under the constraint of pandemic regulations has also accelerated the adoption of working time and flexible locations. In March 2023, 60% of workers had flexible provisions on working hours, compared to 54% in 2019, and in 2025, only 9% of employers authorized any form of hybrid work.

The company has certainly changed, added Steele.

When you recruit now, there is an expectation in certain roles that the default value is to have a certain degree of flexible work or at home, and this was never the case before.

Zoe Deadman, CEO of Cornwalls KCS Print, said Printing week This hybrid had become by default of his business for the roles that allowed it.

We have also acquired a better understanding of work / life balance, and there is certainly more demand, which led us to adapt our work models and our changes to help our staff, she said.

Of course, there is also much more use of remote work tools such as video calls and shared mailboxes.

Companies had to change their supplier approach as well as staff. Resilience to the supply chain, once given in time of deliveries just in time and dilapidated stock levels, has become an important part of business manufacturing, added Deadman.

We have definitely learned to develop more resilience in the company, to give flexibility in turbulent times, she said.

Were definitely more concentrated now on the protection of our money also to ensure that we do not depend too much on the lines of credit. We have found massively important to ensure an excellent working relationship with suppliers, because it is companies and the end of a business.

According to Steele, the security of the supply chain has become an important part of the victory work.

Covid, in combination with the UPM paper strike in 2022, led people to be much more frightened towards resilience, he said, mentioning a definitive increase in the importance of termination during the call for tenders for work.

There is an increasing expectation of customers that your recovery plans after sinister are robust and reduce mustard that they were no longer theoretical. And it is true even for a company of our size [10m turnover, 70 employees]. Pre-comfortable, this kind of expectation would have existed only for a company that had hundreds of employees, but now it is just a permanent characteristic of business.

For companies, however, some of the most acute pressures have been financial. Successive locking exerts enormous pressure on companies despite financial living lines such as the interruption loan scheme for coronavirus companies (CBILS) and leave payments. Today, some companies find it difficult to reimburse these loans.

The industry has lost 40% of its order book in the first locking alone, according to BPIF estimates, with printers on web compensation and long -term particularly affected.

The global levels of debt in our industry are always the highest they have ever been, and still lived with the consequences of this, said Brendan Perring, Director General of IPIA, said Printing week.

To perriner, the most significant change brought by the pandemic was its acceleration of a long-term trend towards automation, thanks to uncertainty over the supply of labor.

Even with the leave scheme, companies suddenly printed in particular those of medium size and larger have seen the need to have systems that were much more automated, he said.

Pre-coating, many medium-sized printed companies, because they did not want to make this capital investment, were always fairly ineffective configurations compared to what was theoretically possible. There were a lot of offline finishing systems that would require some good human beings to move printing from one domain to another to finish it, and there were still a lot of manual data collection or information systems used.

But once the leave has struck, and our sectors of the hospital, retail and leisure bread base have closed, many printed companies had no choice but to put many of their staff on leave.

With the leave, pressure to reach the same level of productivity, by adopting the automation from start to finish, he added.

Companies had no choice. And I think that the saddest thing for me is that many of this human experience and this craft skill have left the hairdressing industry because they were put on leave, but have never been brought back to work because companies have understood that they could run much leaner with much fewer people.

It was a trend that would have taken 10 years to materialize, but it was compressed in two. And now, if you are embarking on a business of our members who employs 50 or more people, their objective is on AI technology, software and automation hardware that is possible from order to printing a truck.