While 2021 was a year of reinventing HR and solidifying its new role, 2022 is going to be all about pushing the boundaries of how HR can add value. In this article, we will review 11 HR trends that are impacting the way we manage Human Resources.
In my regular interactions with our clients and HR professionals from around the world, I’m constantly reminded of two facts:
That nothing has changed more in the past two years than the way we work, and companies operate. And that no other business department has been under more pressure to keep up with this fast pace of change than Human Resources.
From the initial shift towards the full remote working setting, the numerous lockdowns, and health concerns, to the Great Reopening (only to be swiftly followed by the Great Resignation and talent shortages), the disruption to our economies and to every organization has been continuous rather than episodic.
That’s why it is even more crucial to be aware of these HR trends and understand how to leverage them to drive change and add more business value in 2022 and beyond.
Let’s dive in.
Contents
1. HR as a product
2. Collaboration by design
3. Talent marketplaces & talent allocation
4. Career experiences
5. HR owning business transformation
6. Preparing for multiple futures
7. HR tech for good
8. From DEI to DEI&B
9. The shift from people analytics to data literacy
10. Impactful rewards
11. The skills economy
1. HR as a product
One of the most notable HR trends we are seeing right now is the shift away from HR focused on projects towards HR focused on products.
This represents a fundamental change to how HR operates. Traditionally, HR functioned with a project mindset. A project has a clear timeline, set deliverables, a predefined set of resources, and is aimed at being run efficiently.
A product, on the other hand, is ongoing. It doesn’t necessarily have an end and aims to provide value, with (additional) resources being allocated as impact increases.
This shift in mindset will not only increase HR’s service delivery quality, it will also enable HR to better build the capabilities that help improve the businesses’ bottom line.
Such a shift, however, will require an upgrade on the side of HR professionals. They will need to better understand their company’s internal customers, their changing habits and preferences. What’s more, they will need to step up their game in delivering a more personalized and unique employee experience.
2. Collaboration by design
The role of the office has fundamentally changed. It no longer holds that excellent work can only happen in the office, let alone inside an office cubicle. In fact, 77 percent of people have seen their productivity rise during the pandemic. Almost one-third of workers have been able to do more work in less time.
The drawback is that remote work has shrunk employees’ networks and made organizations more siloed. Data from ADP suggest that remote workers have fewer ad-hoc conversations with colleagues than those working on-site (60 percent vs. 77 percent respectively). All of this has a negative impact on collaboration and innovation.
That’s why in 2022, HR will need to become a lot more deliberate and involved in helping organizations reshape the way collaboration, co-creation, and innovation happen.
HR can help create conditions that will allow employees (and HR professionals, for that matter) to work on different projects across the organization or even trans-organizationally (see our next trend on talent marketplaces).
Human Resources practitioners can do this through:
Designing a workplace (both physical and digital) that helps teams work together and connect regardless of where they sit;
Organizational designs that drive cross-functional teams. These incorporate traditional employees, gig-workers, and contractors to intentionally drive collaboration and diversity of thought;
Talent programs that allow for rotation (see our trend on career experiences);
Leveraging digital platforms to connect employees asynchronously so that they can work together anytime, anywhere;
And so on.
By taking a design approach to collaboration, HR can help build an organization that provides the comforts of working from home while ensuring that collaborative practices keep delivering value and innovation to the organization. This is an HR trend that we’re expecting to see much more of in 2022.
3. Talent marketplaces & talent allocation
One of the biggest lessons learned from the pandemic is the fact that companies can no longer solely rely on buying their talent externally. Instead, the tight labor market has forced them to make better use of the talent they already have.
Cue in our next HR trend which involves better talent allocation through talent marketplaces. In a word, talent marketplaces help connect employees within an organization or a sector to internal career opportunities. These include job openings, but also cross-departmental projects, temporary assignments, and other initiatives.
In some sectors, talent allocation has happened organically.
In the shipbuilding industry, professionals are deployed when a new assignment comes in, only to ‘jump ship’ when the contract is about to complete, and a competitor company gets the next big contract. This way, the employee works on relevant projects and can build their own capabilities. Conversely, the company is able to quickly deploy a temporary but skilled workforce based on the projects available.
What has changed is that HR departments are increasingly conscious of the importance of (planned) skill development. As a consequence, more and more companies are looking into partnering up with their strategic partners to create common talent marketplaces.
Recently, Unilever and Vodacom (a Vodafone subsidiary) initiated a digital marketing exchange program. This initiative not only helps build more diverse capabilities but also provides the opportunity for cross-pollination of ideas and innovation.
But Unilever and Vodacom are not the only ones. In fact, according to a Harvard Business School report, almost two-thirds of businesses now prefer to borrow or rent people with certain skills from other companies, instead of recruiting new full-time staff.
Under this model, organizations bring workers in on an as-needed basis to consult or to work on a specific assignment – one of the HR trends that we will see much more of in 2022.
To read the full article, please go to https://www.aihr.com/blog/hr-trends/