With 2022 well upon us it’s a good time for HR professionals and employers alike to review and align their organisational goals with emerging HR trends. A recent global survey* of more than 500 HR leaders from various industries demonstrates how certain HR trends are likely to manifest in the workplace and while the findings are in keeping with similar trends from previous research, the team at Gartner say the drivers of their priorities have shifted in light of COVID-19.
HR Trend 1. Building critical skills
Companies prioritising efforts to upskill their workforce has been common practice for a number of years, but this trend has been supercharged by the pandemic.
The need for businesses to pivot their approach – and in many instances, has fast tracked their digital first model with a greater focus on digital skills. Limited access to overseas talent has also contributed to this need.
When planning for the next three to five years, many organisations have realised that their skills they will need in the future don’t fit into the current roles they have. Organisations are creating new roles to address this issue, but it also requires a fundamental change in mindset from both organisations and employees viewing skills development as a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’. Arj Bagga, Director of HR Advisory at Gartner says, “upskilling employees isn’t just about developing brand new skills in areas of growth but identifying current skills that might be redundant in years to come.”
“If an employee needs five skills to do a job, it’s likely that two of the current skills they have will no longer be relevant in five years, and they’ll be adding two more skills. One in three current skills will be redundant by the end of 2022, so that helps to provide capacity for upskilling.”
Skills that could be deemed unnecessary are those that are predicated on traditional, repetitive, or operational – skills that can be automated.
HR trend 2: Organisational design and change management
With 48 percent of HR leaders* saying organisational design and change management is their top priority for 2022, it’s imperative to find ways of making change a less unsettling experience for employees. Over 50 per cent of HR leaders surveyed said their employees are suffering from change fatigue – leading to resistance in the workplace and exhausting and often anxiety provoking outcomes.
A common HR myth that often does the rounds is that it is the volume of changing experiences that drive employee fatigue levels.
There are in fact two factors that drive change fatigue.
- Exertion. The level of effort expected by employees to display in implementing change; and,
- Disruption. To an employee’s workflow when a change is implemented.
Just focusing on how to reduce the volume isn’t a sustainable exercise because due to the way organisations are moving, the volume of changes is only expected to increase.
It’s important, then, that employers find ways of making changes that aren’t disruptive or exertive.
The key to this lies in building employees’ resilience, through management taking a more active stance in supporting their employees’ mental health, not only through driving productivity and performance.
HR trend 3: Current and future leadership
Building a resilient workforce requires employers to lead from a place of empathy. “The nature of a manager’s role these days is very different to what it was three or five years ago,” says Bagga. “A lot of employees are burning out, so the sustainability of their performance is at risk. It’s a manager’s role to be able to help build that resilience.”
Employers need to consider emotional and people skills when promoting employees into managerial positions and this should be a key focus when developing leaders to create a mindset around empathy and being more empathetic.
Another trend is employees seeking more informal leadership opportunities. “People are looking at their individual contribution, and where they can play a coaching and mentoring role across the organisation rather than having formal responsibility over a person or a whole team’s performance,” says Bagga.
Through guiding their workforce through tough periods by having several people wearing informal mentorship or leadership hats organisations are reducing the pressure placed on one manager to be the sole support person for an employee.
The idea of a business coach has with managers being more of a broker to the right experts across the business. Their role is identifying skill needs and pairing an employee up with the right coach and mentor rather than always providing that coaching and mentoring themselves.
HR trend 4: Future of work plans
One of the things HR leaders need to start doing as part of their strategic thinking is scenario planning.
This involves assessing and evaluating the data, looking for trends that could impact business continuity, and creating contingency plans around those scenarios, rather than just one fixed strategy. This could be identifying technology
Organisations need to remain agile, adaptable, and willing to alter plans at short notice in response to internal or external shifts. Once a strategy has been created, they must be willing to iterate and flex on it as changing circumstances arise, rather than a set and forget approach.
HR trend 5: Diversity, equity, and inclusion
Ten years ago, organisations would seldom take a public position on social justice issues; today, organisations are not only open to discussion but are boldly taking a stance on these issues.
With the increased profile of social change actions such as the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) is now an even greater priority for HR leaders and has become an area of competitive advantage and differentiation in the labour market with candidates, suppliers and consumers wanting to know an organisation’s position before they choose to join, work with or purchase from a business.
To advance towards true excellence, organisations must ensure a level playing field in advancement and opportunity. They should deploy analytics tools to show that promotions, pay processes, and the criteria behind them, are transparent and fair; debias these processes; and strive to meet diversity targets in their long-term workforce plans.
Organisations should place their core-business leaders and managers at the heart of the DE&I effort—beyond the HR function or employee resource-group leaders. In addition, they should not only strengthen the inclusive-leadership capabilities of their managers and executives but also more emphatically hold all leaders to account for progress on DE&I.
*Gartner.com/en/human-resources/trends/top priorities-for-hr-leaders
This has been adapted from an article originally published by HRM Online 22 October 2021. https://www.hrmonline.com.au/future-of-work/5-critical-hr-trends-for-2022/