Chaos, juggling plans, creating new rules, adapting to these changes, and leaning toward these new learnings sum up 2020 and 2021. Covid-19 defined most HR strategies across organizations in the year 2021. According to industry experts, the trend is likely to continue until H1Q2022 or even further.
If we go by the industry analysts, remote working, hybrid working model, work-life balance, people-oriented strategies, mobility, digital, green earth, and sustainability are the new buzzwords driving HR departments.
Let us look at some HR trends that will drive the HR segments globally. However, let’s take a look at the challenges first.
Challenges
As Heads of Department across organizations point out, the team spirit is missing. Work is getting I-centric instead of We-centered. HR departments are constantly tasked with motivating employees to work as a unit, and in a bid to do so, are propping up unique initiatives to encourage team spirit. Some examples are the intranet, virtual competitions, group games, motivational talks, virtual awards and recognition, and appraisals. Major morale boosters are pep talks by senior management and personalised notes by immediate superiors.
Many enterprises that have adopted a people-centric approach have seen better employee engagement, lower attrition rate and overall positive environment at the virtual workplace, which in turn translated to better mental health and an active support for each other.
Remote working/ hybrid working:
Many corporates encouraged employees to work from home even before the pandemic. However, COVID-19 forced the corporates to impose remote working as an HR policy. While initially, many employees found remote working a major challenge in terms of lack of connectivity, interruptions and longer working hours, the tables have now turned. According to a report by the World Economic Forum, more than 95 per cent of employees now want to work remotely.
While agreeing for WFH, companies are also devising Hybrid models for teams. A few days of a month, the entire team spends together in the office. This is to ensure team communication help employees to have the required human interaction and also to ensure the well being of each member.
Online trainings:
As more offices have moved online, training sessions, certifications and upskilling too have gone online. Virtual is the new reality today. Virtual classrooms, lectures, exams, and certifications are in vogue. As a result, more and more HR departments are tying up with virtual educators who meet their requirements.
For instance, institutes such as UpGrad, Udemy and Coursera offer limitless courses, some of them for free, and employees are lapping up these courses to further their careers. Also, with opportunities opening in greener pastures such as renewables and sustainability, digital, mobility, etc, the new learning is enabling the employees to not only jump to a new organization, but are able to take home/demand better pay packages.
As per a new survey by Udemy, the demand for upskilling grew by over 38 per cent in the past year.
Virtual onboarding and employee engagement:
One of the major tasks for the HR departments in the virtual world is on-boarding new employees and engaging them. Starting from understanding and assessing the candidate to orientation and merging with the team is a task when done digitally, says HR professionals. Ensuring the well-being of employees also weighs high in the digital world.
Digital:
The digital push has taken off in a big way. With enterprises allocating a major part of their IT budgets towards automation to cut costs, digital is emerging as the new trend. BYOD, mobility, and work from home are driving enterprises to look at going digital in a big way. Cloud computing, AI, ML, IoT are some of the technologies enabling these enterprises in their endeavour.
For organisations, especially HR departments and the employees, it is a task to marry the ever-changing work environment and its challenges. But the beauty is that, both are taking the right effort to learn and find harmony.
Article Contributed by WriteCanvas- content partner of NEXO
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