How the COVID-19 pandemic changed the work of managers: Case study of economic managers

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the business environment in many sectors. This study analyzes how the pandemic and the resulting global economic crisis have influenced changes in management. The aim was to explore changes in the dominance of management functions through the lens of economic managers in various companies. A case study approach was adopted to achieve the research objective. The sample file consisted of 238 managers from various operational fields in the Slovak Republic. A new methodology was created to measure the overall changes. An indicator of the rate of change in the dominance of the management functions was calculated. The index consists of two factors: changes in the time devoted to each management function during the pandemic, and changes in the importance of basic activities performed within the individual management function. This study provides an overview of all industries and describes the changes in the context of a company's revenue development during the pandemic. It was discovered that the centralization of strategic decision making was significantly underestimated. Up to 78.69% of managers working in companies whose revenues decreased during the pandemic increased the time devoted to planning, and 90.98% of them decreased the time devoted to leading people.