At EY Seren we help organisations achieve growth by serving the needs of people, communities and the planet.

Well, the world flipped for all of us four weeks ago.

As a research-led organisation, we instinctively started gathering insights and avidly discussing scenarios to help one another make sense of this rapidly emerging new reality. We quickly formalised that collective effort into a research sprint team, which has led to our first edition of Human Signals – our fortnightly briefing on how COVID-19 is changing human behaviour.

Aside from the terrible human trauma of the coronavirus, there has also been significant behavioural trauma too. Fathers, mothers, children, leaders, managers, workers, politicians, carers – everyone has become a forced participant in a mandatory, ill-prepared behavioural experiment. There’s likely more to come and, clearly some are suffering much more than others.

Fathers, mothers, children, leaders, managers, workers, politicians, carers – everyone has become a forced participant in a mandatory, ill-prepared behavioural experiment.

We believe this seismic shift will demand significant change from those that serve people – particularly private and public sector service providers and employers. Human Signals seeks to track those changes, forecast what might come next, and consider the implications in practical and constructive ways.

We hope you enjoy these editions and that the insights resonate with you. We welcome feedback and input. We’re all in this experiment together.

Our method

The situation is fast moving and defies clear conclusions at this stage. So we’re taking a sprint-based, hypothesis-led approach, so that we actively and continually challenge our assumptions. Our gathering techniques are:

• Desk research
• Depth interviews with people, virtually, in their own homes about what really matters to them right now
• Diary studies with customers across the UK to get insight into how behaviour is changing
• Quantitative surveys to validate and scale our insight
• Interviews with design leaders and experts across sectors to understand how COVID-19 is transforming the role of design and delivery For synthesis and analysis, we’re working remotely across Mural and MS Teams, according to sprint rituals and a shared kanban. We’re then working closely with our colleagues in Storytelling to design and compose our outputs for publication.