Top Ten H.R. Trends For The 2022 Workplace
As we approach 2022, the way we perform our jobs, where we work, the people we work with, how we work, and the tools that we utilize are always in change. Many of these changes were initiated before the outbreak but were amplified by it and have now become permanent features of the workplace.
#1 The Future Of Work Is Employee Wellbeing
Wellbeing for employees is no anymore a benefit for employees. Instead, it is an offer for employers to help employees throughout their work and personal life. Figure 1 that employee wellbeing has expanded beyond physical wellness to include financial, emotional, social, and professional wellbeing.
Since the outbreak, wellbeing has expanded beyond employees to the whole family unit. Hewlett Packard is an inspirational example of extending benefits for employees and their families. The H.P. Spirit Program provides health and well-being applications, educational materials for working parents for managing to homeschool, and an employee Resource Group for Working Parents and job-sharing opportunities for specific job roles.
Since the pandemic is deep into their second anniversary, emphasis on employee health has shifted from improving benefits for employees to enhancing employees’ personal and family lives. Venture capital is adhering to this trend, with tools such as League, Virgin Pulse, Limeade, BetterUp, SoundingBoard, SpringHealth, and equilibrium, among others. Resilience has been delivering results for businesses. meQuilibrium’s most prominent publicly-traded customers with the highest scores for strength at the start outperformed Dow Jones Industrial Average by 116% over the course from December 2018 until December 2020.
#2 Employee Well-being Welfare Can Stem The Great Resignation
Although increasing wages is an option to draw and keep workers, research conducted by Paychex and Future Workplace among 603 full-time employees revealed that 62% of respondents considered wellbeing benefits to be to the decision to accept an offer to join a new company. This was particularly true for Gen Z with 67% who were either entirely or overwhelmingly in agreement that wellbeing benefits would be an essential factor for them in assessing new job offers. The most important benefits for employees that are demanded include financial well-being and mental health, and emotional wellbeing. Financial education and training are becoming more important for workers across all generations. The BrightPlan Wellness Barometer 2021 survey revealed that over 80 percent of employees desire assistance and advice from their employer on their finances. This is not just to help with financial education and retirement as well as financial planning, digital budgeting, and access to financial experts.
Alongside financial and mental health, more than 30% of workers surveyed in this Paychex and Future Workplace survey required better mental health care and tools. It is estimated that the Global Wellness Institute believes that benefits for mental health in the workplace will increase by 9.8 percent annually in the five years to come.
The H.R. professionals should shift away from the one-size-fits-all benefits to a customized plan for wellbeing benefits. The objective is to establish an environment that caters to the needs of everyone’s employees.
#3 Cross-breed Work Is What The Majority Of Worker’s Want
Hybrid work is in the air. Accenture’s research shows the following: 83% of employees prefer a hybrid approach to work, as well as that 63% of growth-oriented businesses have already implemented the “productivity anywhere” model for their workforce. Both employers and employees, the concept of working anywhere mean achieving outcomes, no matter the place or time work takes place. Our work from anywhere In the future, a study carried out by Prithwiraj Choudhury, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, reports that workers view flexibility to work from any location as an essential aspect of their job.
This makes the definition of successful practices for working from anywhere essential for employers. Employers such as those at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, GitLab as well as Zapier and Zapier are implementing policies that will ensure virtual collaboration, mentorship, and synchronous brainstorming for employees who work from any location. They can do this by making virtual groups of practice available to remote employees to ensure that every remote worker is equipped with the appropriate collaboration tools, such as Slack and online whiteboards, such as Miro, Mural, Stormboard, and Annotator to facilitate collaborative brainstorming synchronously.
Additionally, employers must demonstrate how their approach to management changes in light of the increasing number of employees working from anywhere. This requires that they clearly define how they intend to make a fair and fair working environment that is accessible to all workers, regardless of where they work, and describing how they will manage employees that they do not see and how teams will be able to work from anywhere to achieve their objectives. Leaders need to reconsider how the post-pandemic business environment will work for their Business and explain this to everyone in the organization.
#4 Employees Seek Companie’s Whose Values Match Their Own
Future Workplace and Blue Beyond Consulting’s study, Closing the Employee Expectations Gap, conducted with 753 HR executives and knowledge-based workers, revealed eight out of ten employees saying it’s important that their company’s values be in line with their values. However, a huge gap exists between the knowledge employees and the company’s leaders, which we refer to as the Employee Expectation Gap.
These results are significant because 75% of workers think their employers and businesses generally to be a force them to be a positive force in the society. This number reaches the 80% mark for those who are under forty-five years of age. In addition, our study found that more than half of all knowledge workers have said they would leave their job if their employer’s values didn’t align with their own. In addition, only one in four knowledgeable people will take a job at an organization whose values are not in line with their values.
Leaders should begin to take action on the gap between expectations and performance of employees by participating in ongoing listening sessions with employees and by committing to more humane work conditions and conditions for every employee, regardless of their location.
#5 Skill’s Based Hiring Is on the Rise
Artificial intelligence (A.I.) is transforming the world of work by automating some jobs and creating completely new jobs requiring high-demand skills. The 21 H.R. jobs of the future research discovered a variety of new H.R. positions that will be developed between now and 2030. Many of them are focused on human beings working in tandem with machines, for example, Algorithm B.O. as well as Human-Machine Teaming Manager.
It is important to prove one’s competence in these new areas has become the standard to increase talent mobility, as degrees have been proven to be an ineffective indicator for having the skills in demand. In reality, Glassdoor reports that fifteen companies, that range from Google up to Hilton Hotels and Apple, offer well-paying positions to people who have the skills in demand however, they do not have the necessary degree.
Companies are increasingly experimenting with skills-based hiring, which is the process of establishing specific skills and competencies for jobs, rather than simply looking at candidates’ qualifications . Skills-based hiring increases the talent pool. It also allows internal employees to gain greater insight into their advancement opportunities by providing education pathways specific to certain jobs and industries.
#6 Longevity Leads To Multiple Careers
Although this doesn’t necessarily mean doing the same position throughout your entire career, this is an essential question to H.R. managers What can they do to increase the commitment of a company to lifelong learning help to improve and re-skill employees over what could be a 60-year career?
Amazon Career Choice has accomplished $1.2 billion to support laborers on an hourly basis with bachelor’s or associate’s degrees and high school diplomas, GEDs, and English as A Second Language. They also will provide the proficiency certificates that will help re-train workers in highly-demanding areas like Engineering, Information-Technology, Mechanical and Electrical Trades, Healthcare, Construction, Transportation, Accounting.
Amazon Career Choice and Three, a Wiley Educational Services company show what is possible through customized programs that teach essential computer skills for hourly workers. The students are generally Amatzon Warehouse and Delivery employees who are able to acquire the digital tools that could alter their job path from a worker at the warehouse and I.T. experts.
#7 Up-Skilling HR Is Difficult To Lead Workforce Variation
In The ever-changing role of Learning in Workforce Change, Future Workplace, in partnership with G.P. Strategies, conducted a survey of 549 executives from H.R. as well as Business to understand the way that learning is growing across all industries and what its implications are for the development of new skills needed by the learning and development teams. A significant finding that came out of our interviews with CHROs and CLOs is that, often, H.R. focuses on training and up-skilling the critical roles of Business but does not think about training their team members. The H.R. or Learning departments are now the cobbler’s kids, largely unnoticed and left on their own to learn new skills. This must change.
This study revealed that creating a culture that promotes continuous learning, and continually improving the learning skills of team members for development are two of the most important priorities for 2025.
The 549 HR and Business executives recognized the need to bring innovation within the learning process as a major theme in the 2025 timeframe. We analyzed the competencies learners needed the most; they cited the business competencies like business and commercial knowledge, people analytics, and digital marketing.
Leaders in H.R. and Learning should begin asking themselves: Am I anticipating the growth of new skills and abilities on behalf of my employees? If so, what are I doing to do this?
#8 Power Skills Include Human Skills & Digital
In 2021, we learned that we must develop the ability to deal with rapid changes in the way and places we work. We also learned that we must seamlessly collaborate across various technology platforms, such as Zoom, WebEx, Slack, Stream Yard, and Microsoft Teams, not to include a variety of brand emerging virtual reality platforms such as Strive Immerse and BodySwaps.
It’s not a surprise to learn that the LinkedIn 2021 learning Report list of the top 10 abilities includes a mixture of technological and digital fluency skills. The ten skills considered to be the most powerful are illustrated in Figure 4.
The most sought-after power skill called resilience is described by Andrew Shatte, Ph.D., co-founder of meQuilibrium, as the capacity to show problem-solving skills and emotional control, as well as optimism and self-efficacy. Resilience can be taught and reinforced, then incorporated into a company. It is estimated that 2021 will be the year of resilience. Workplace Learning Report finds 59 percent of learning leaders mention the need to improve their employees’ skills as their primary goal.
#9 Working Parents Anticipat a New Employer Value Proposition
Due to the widespread of this Omicron variation, a rising number of schools in the United States have postponed the reopening of schools or changed on to the remote method of instruction. This has further exacerbated what has been a crisis for parents who work.
Parents who are working now want the same with their employer. McKinsey’s research has found that parents who work tend to have quit their jobs over the last two years instead of their non-parent counterparts. The reasons include fatigue from the demands that come with operating at home and managing childcare, difficulties in returning to work and not being able to find an uninterrupted childcare schedule, and reviewing their life balance. It is likely to be the same in the coming months, particularly with the Omicron version’s uncertainty.
H.R. leaders must pay particular focus to the specific demands of working parents. They should look into creating specific work procedures to meet their needs, for example, subsidized childcare and increased parental leave for parents and fathers. Additionally, employers can think about stretching the boundaries of flexible work by offering everyone (not only parents) the option of cutting back to 60 percent working hours or switching to a less demanding task for a short period but knowing that the employees will be able to increase their workload when they are they are ready.
#10 The CHRO Role Has Been Upraise And Shifted Forever
In the beginning, Covid-19 companies believed that they were confronting a health-care issue, which was a real estate issue. The problems that encounter CHROs include:
- Being able to lead with empathy and understanding of the priorities of various sections of the workforce.
- Offering flexible working options.
- Creating healthy work environments that promote employee wellbeing.
- Developing a fair and equal workplace for everyone (regardless of their location).
The CHRO has become an essential member of the C-suite, working with the chiefs of Technology, Finance, Real Estate, Workforce Variation, and the Chief Medical Officer to ensure a safe return to work. As an illustration of how significant the job of CHRO is one of Leena Nair, the previous CHRO at Unilever, Leena Nair was recently named CEO of Chanel.
The changing workplace requires leaders in Business and H.R. to pose a new set of questions regarding work and the worker and the workplace. These include:
What will leaders do in this new era of work?
What kinds of changes can improve the experience of employees?
What will leaders do to communicate the rules of work that are effective no matter where they are?
What is the future role and function of the physical workplace?
Confident leaders must show the ability to be resilient, compassionate, transparent, and digital fluency to ensure that everyone can be a part of shaping new work opportunities.
