2022 Best Bits of HR Advice You’re Likely to Read This Year

While the world continues to grapple with managing and moving beyond COVID-19 and its effects, Excelerator® has identified HR trends that will surface in 2022.

Outsourcing Growth

As HR has become more complex, organizations are seeking ways to get the most value from their HR function without laying in additional cost. This contributes to a shift towards outsourcing HR functions to professionals with the required expertise while containing costs.

The increase in HR outsourcing is affected too by the growing role of human resources in corporate strategies. The complexity of employee benefits and employment regulations continue to push companies to seek expertise through HR professional services outside their workforce.

Organizational Strategy

HR professionals continue to take a more involved role in corporate strategy. HR professionals can provide valuable insights and projections about workforce performance and its effects on a company's success. HR teams will continue to increase in strategic value to organizations.

HR professionals are increasingly needing to develop specializations. Organizations small to large need HR persons who are specialists in employment compliance; training; diversity and inclusion; recruiting; benefits; payroll; employee engagement and experience; employee relations; remote performance management; and more.

Employee Engagement

For organizations and particularly industries where remote working is utilized, the current trend and challenge continues to involve boosting employee engagement.

An HR trend to anticipate this year involves changes in organizational culture. Employees want more insights on how organizations are run, and they want a say on corporate strategizing and implementation. As a result, organizational culture now should move away from traditional hierarchies and towards flatter, circular structures that include employees in the decision-making process.

The collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought upon employees and employers an expectation of practicing compassion in the workplace. This is a key trend in employee engagement this 2022 and beyond. In these difficult times, it is crucial for employers to check not only what their employees are doing, but how they are doing.

An additional way HR professionals can engage employees is through socially responsible programs that an organization supports and includes employees as a team to participate in with management.

Although there are various types of corporate social responsibility for organizations to pursue, here we highlight the positive effect on employees through philanthropy to enhance employee engagement. Philanthropy through organizational donations of money or time to civic organizations, engagement with community initiatives, and support for employee volunteering. These types of socially responsible programs can be effective as a recruitment tool too, as employees look for organizations that give them volunteer opportunities as a work balance.

Diverse and Inclusive Workforce

Though this isn't a new trend, 2022 and coming years will see increased efforts from HR teams to create and maintain a diverse and inclusive workforce with respect to demographics, gender, gender identity, race, age, religion and nationality.

The increased push for diversity and inclusion may be caused by heavier scrutiny under certain federal, state and local laws of the bias organizations and their HR teams may have during hiring.

Once again, the expertise and specialization of HR persons who understand unconscious biases, such as demographics, gender, gender identity, race, age, religion, and nationality that influence the hiring process and use methods to minimize their effects on recruitment is essential to screen candidates and identify the most suitable candidates.

Organizations that don't want to face discrimination lawsuits would do well to engage with HR experts to develop recruitment strategies that ensure equal opportunities are given to all applicants.

Continuous Performance Management

This year, particularly with the use of remote working in certain industries, will see organizations and HR teams working towards developing new strategies for managing employees' performance.

Over the past few years, organizations are shifting away from annual appraisals and towards continuous performance management.

Employees want instant feedback and coaching on their performance, as it helps further their professional development and encourages career growth. Moreover, managers are increasingly expected to provide sufficient guidance not only for performance improvement but also for the learning of new skills.

From a retention and engagement perspective, employees want to be recognized for performance. From an employer perspective, continuous performance management helps with productivity and innovation.

HR professionals can help change performance management strategies by ensuring that organizations have a culture of open communication and collaboration.

Skills and Compliance Training

With organizations facing a shortage of identifying talent, organizations will increasingly seek to reskill employees.

Instead of increasing efforts to hire talented workers that may not be available, more CEOs, executives, and HR teams are focused on reskilling and upskilling their workforce to fill their organizations' needs for innovation and meet corporate goals or alternatively outsourcing to acquire the expertise needed.

HR teams will focus on fine-tuning their learning and development strategies.

One learning and development strategy gaining traction is learning in the flow of work. Through this method, employees can access bite-sized pieces of knowledge to resolve the skills-related issues they encounter as they work. This creates an environment where employees can learn as they work and at their own pace.

As liability and monetary damages increase for organizations under updated federal, state and local employment laws, HR teams will increasingly need to update and create compliance training for employees including discrimination, sexual harassment prevention training, and much more.

Resilience

The world is undergoing increasingly rapid, unpredictable, and unprecedented change. But across industries, most organizations have remained persistently focused on near- and medium-term earnings, typically assuming ongoing smooth business conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic launched the need for a new approach.

Catastrophic events will grow more frequent but less predictable.

HR teams are uniquely suited to weigh in across all parts of the organization to create synergies and add value where needed due to their perspective and understanding of the organization's employees performance and capabilities; managing the workplace during COVID-19 and other changing conditions; skill and compliance training; and more.

Excelerator® provides HR outsourcing and advisory; skill and compliance training; recruiting; and payroll services. Contact us to find out more about how we can help you at www.exceleratorconsulting.com.