The Future of HR: Looking at the next 10 years
HR has been evolving a lot as a function in the last couple of years. The war for talent has been increasing, and as a consequence organizations are looking at HR more prominently than before. A lot of the future of HR will be decided by the investment of top leaders in some of the most serious challenges HR is facing today. The changes happen slowly so most challenges won’t be addressed and solved in the short run.
In a recent survey done by the Society for Human Resource Management, HR professionals say that the three biggest challenges facing HR executives over the next 10 years are:
1. Retaining and rewarding the best employees (59%)
2. Developing the next generation of corporate leaders (52%)
3. Creating a corporate culture that attracts the best employees (36%)
This research also explores investment challenges, talent management tactics, evolvement of the workforce, and critical HR competencies and knowledge.
Well, a lot of the challenges mentioned start with hiring. And nowadays hiring is connected to having a strong employer brand. However, in most organizations HR and Marketing don’t communicate with each other as much as they should. They don’t interact enough to understand the value proposition they offer to candidates or the path that one must take to become a leader in the company, and most C-level executives do not recognize HR enough to let them co-lead, along with the CEO, the implementation of a certain company culture.
So if we look at the upcoming 10 years of HR, here is what will be different:
1. HR will be flexible
As shown in the survey by SHRM, providing flexible work arrangements will be a top priority for organizations. 9 to 5 work is over, young professionals are looking for places where they can have the chance to take time off to be creative, be able to take a break without being judged, go solve administrative issues without having to take a day off, or even work from home with pre-agreed objectives.
Employees want flexibility and will excel in their performance if they are allowed to adjust both their work and personal lifestyle. HR is starting to understand that, we see many hot startups implementing such methods and the next 10 years will only bring more of this.
2. HR will be social
Intranet, internal social platforms, internal “Facebooks”, and many other ways of promoting online collaboration and communication across the company will be part of HR responsibilities in the future. HR can use social tools to drive behaviors in office performance by giving extra benefits to high performers of the month or give incentives to employees who are great brand ambassadors. The work experience will be taken live and will bring a stronger social component to organizations.
3. HR will be mobile
We all know that mobile is the new hot trend in almost every industry; HR is no exception. If you are a recruiter, you want to wake up, have a nice breakfast, and check your mobile recruiting app while commuting to your office to see the new applicants you have in the system. You will want to leave comments, assign tasks, and when arriving to the office have your team already working on such tasks. You will want to able to check, while having a coffee before entering an individual performance meeting, what comments were given during the last meeting. You will want to be able to check how you’re performing in terms of workforce happiness, to check the latest stats on your mobile and give a report to your CEO.
All in all, the lifestyle of an HR person will not be desktop-based. It will be wherever they are, whenever they wants.
4. HR will be about data
How many days does it take to hire a new person? What is the best quarter to hire specific profiles? When are people the happiest throughout the year? Who are the most performing people and why? What are the trending skills we need to acquire in the next hire? These and many more questions are all connected to the hot topic of Big Data. But data is meaningless without interpretation and context. HR will have a great deal of responsibility in analysing the data, interpreting it and making the right decisions in order to ensure the right acquisition, training, development and retention of talent.
5. HR will be integrated
This might sound strange, but yes, HR will become a set very diverse skills. HR will be composed by tech savvy people, data scientists, recruiter experts, connectors and brand editors. People that are able to do copywriting, for job descriptions that correspond to the company culture. People that are able to read data and forecast trends. People that are on top of the latest technology and can solve problems or bring additional benefits to the company. People that are connectors, socially active and can attract more talents to the company. HR will be about diversity of skills.
The next decade is crucial for HR to evolve and become a key role in any organization. HR might no longer be a single department in the future. HR might be part of something greater. Exciting times are ahead of HR. Tell us what you think HR will look like in the next 10 years.
