While studying the data it appears that the net delta between the total number of employees before the pandemic and after is a negative change of -39 employees. This net negative change is mainly attributed to letting go of part-timers (-21 part-timers) and that of consultants (-16 consultants). While permanent staf have witnessed a net positive change of +8. Male staf have also witnessed a positive net change +35 male employees as well as female staf who have witnessed a positive net change +48 female employees, which implies that African SMEs have continued to grow at their normal pace despite the pandemic.
Team Capacity
To understand whether the pandemic had an impact on the capacity of employees (number of employees), we asked “COVID-19 did not have any impact on our capacity of employees”, and we found that for 98 respondents (43,8%) it did not while for 126 respondents (56,3%) the COVID-19 afected their capacity of employees.
Figure 3.18; Team capacity post COVID-19
Whether the “COVID-19 had a positive impact on our ability to hire more people for the company’s workforce” we fnd that 21,4% strongly disagree and 29,5% disagree meaning that more than half our population (50,9%) saw a negative impact on their capacity of employees. Only for 28,5% was the impact of the pandemic positive on their capacity of employees.
Figure 3.19: Positive impact on the ability to hire more people
To reinforce this stance, we re-ask participants: “During the COVID-19 outbreak, I realized that in my company we did not need as many employees as we had before the outbreak”, and the results come in once more coherent with those for the previous question (i.e. only 25,4% agree with this statement and 4,9% strongly agree) indicating that in total only 30,3% of survey respondents think it would be better to reduce the number of employees.
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