The Top 10 Trends in Human Resources Management This Year

Human resources is among the most important parts of any business, streamlining everything from hiring to protecting employees. But as our society and workplaces change, so, too, does human resources management. Here are the top ten trends we can expect to see in human resources in the next year.

1. Towards the Organization of the Future

The way organizations operate today is radically different from the way they did ten years ago. Due to the demands of organizational change, 88% of the executives surveyed consider the construction of the organizational model of the future to be important.

Agility plays a key role in this new model. Breaking with hierarchical structures and moving towards models focused on work between teams, each of them with resources and capacities to make decisions, is necessary to be able to compete and win in the current business environment.

This new team management model requires new leaders who have skills such as negotiation, resilience, and systematic thinking. Leaders who know in detail the skills of each individual in order to be able to form new groups quickly and efficiently, and who know how to define clear and quantifiable objectives for each of the teams. There are techniques such as the ONA, also known as organizational network analysis, which help companies to know and identify the experts and the existing connections between the different teams.

2. Professional Careers & Training

Learning tools are changing rapidly. Traditional systems are being complemented or replaced by a wide range of new technologies such as YouTube, edXm, Udacity… This new reality is forcing companies to redesign their strategies, offering learning opportunities and continuous development. 83% of the leaders surveyed affirm that their organizations are increasingly flexible and already have dynamic professional development models. In addition, this helps to improve the corporate culture.

3. Acquisition of Talent

In today’s digital era, the brand image that a company projects must be attractive to be able to attract the best talent. That is why more and more companies are making more efforts in the management of employment branding, which is to strengthen the image and perception of an organization towards its customers, employees, and especially its potential candidates.

This requires an effective mix of attributes, among which are the experiences that are lived in the professional environment and a solid professional development plan. In fact, it is so necessary to carry out dissemination campaigns that attract new candidates such as conducting marketing campaigns to promote a product or service. This can be done through cognitive tools and other video and gamification solutions.

4. Employee Experience

To retain millennials, HR departments are using new approaches such as design thinking and employee journey maps. They are focusing on understanding and improving the employee experience; we must not forget that a good experience for employees translates into a good experience for customers. That is why it was positioned as one of the highest priorities for 2017, as 82% of the executives surveyed stated.

An employee brand translates into reputation for the company, the experience that the employee tells the world can become a competitive advantage. We must not forget to monitor and analyze the satisfaction of different types of workers such as freelancers, part-time employees, and alumni.

5. Towards a New Management Model: Performance Management

In recent years, organizations have radically changed the way they evaluate their employees, and for this, leaders must be retrained to implement new work monitoring methodologies.

Team-centric methodologies are being adopted, which focus on teamwork. Rather than looking at the individual achievements of the employee, they focus on assessing the impact of their contribution on the team.

Keep in mind that if the team wins, the employee wins – and, therefore, the company. Qualitative information is what helps organizations identify the most productive employees and carry out promotions and other rewards with them.

6. Changes in the Leadership Model

New leaders need to have different abilities than those of previous generations, but most companies have not moved fast enough to develop digital leaders.

The new type of leader must know how to build and lead teams, keep people connected and loyal, and promote a culture of innovation, learning, and continuous improvement.

It is necessary to build new leadership models, as companies now aim for different goals such as innovation. 90% of them are redesigning their organizations with the aim of being more dynamic, team-centric, and connected. This is one of the greatest needs of companies today, since only 5% of companies believe they have good leaders with skills in the digital field.

7. The Digitalization of the Human Resources Department

HR departments play a crucial role in helping the digital transformation of a company. They face a double challenge: on the one hand, to transform the activities of the department itself, and on the other, to transform the workforce. According to report data, 33% of the human resources teams surveyed are using some type of artificial intelligence and 41% are actively developing mobile applications to offer human resources services.

Leaders who are capable of adopting new technologies and ways of working, as well as constantly reinventing themselves, will have a strong impact on the company’s results and the experience of their employees.

8. Web Analyst: One of the Most Demanded Profiles

The digital transformation has led to a new professional profile, the web analyst. Organizations are redesigning their analytical equipment to develop digital solutions that allow one to measure, analyze, and use the information, and thus to understand in depth each part of the operations processes.

Web analytics are being applied to a wide variety of business processes, with contracting being the ones that most require this measurement, followed by performance management. The new analysis tools allow executives to have a great combination of metrics to help them understand which strategies are really generating results.

9. Diversity & Inclusion Strategies

In the turbulent political environment in which we find ourselves, where nationalisms have gained ground and the demographic changes make different generations, they have turned diversity and inclusion strategies into one of the priorities for this year, according to 69% of the executives surveyed.

Diversity and inclusion directly impact the brand, performance, and corporate objectives, becoming one of the most relevant aspects for the acquisition of talent and the construction of the aforementioned employment brand. 78% of respondents believe that the proper implementation of these strategies represent a competitive advantage for the company.

Organizations are obliged to set new rules based on transparency, and that influence changes in measurement processes and tools to identify possible problems of gender, racial inequality, or disparities in compensation and rewards.

10. The Transformation of Jobs

The nature of the work is changing as a result of the increasing adoption of cognitive technologies and the digitization of processes. Automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence systems are transforming the workforce. In turn, organizations are redesigning jobs to take advantage of the implementation of these technologies.

While some dramatize the negative consequences that these technologies will have, it is proven that the use of these tools will not only help create new specialized jobs, but also increase productivity. Jobs should be thought of as a set of tasks that, if they can be automated, will help to concentrate human efforts on customer experience, employee experience, and on the organization’s value proposition to society. There are a number of human resources training courses that are available online.