In this paper, we investigate nurses’ perceptions of the role of HRM in addressing their needs as frontline employees, and how those perceptions changed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. By integrating literature from the areas of frontline service employee management, HRM, and crisis management into our longitudinal, qualitative study, we identify three primary roles of HRM that the nurses felt were critical to supporting their wellbeing and sustained delivery of quality patient care during the crisis, but were lacking from HRM in their hospitals, namely communication, planning and addressing emotional demands. Importantly, our findings also emphasize the dynamic nature of employee perceptions of HRM, particularly as a crisis compounds existing job demands on the frontlines, necessitating a more responsive form of HRM. Ultimately, we propose the need for a more reflexive, differentiated approach to HRM, built to meet the unique needs of frontline service employees during a crisis.
