HRO’s Prediction of the Top HR Trends in 2021 and Beyond
2020 has seen a lot of workplace change in light of the coronavirus crisis. Whether this is regards where and when employees work, how businesses have continued day-to-day operations in a virtual context, to recruitment and onboarding, employers and HR functions have been forced to adapt. As 2021 draws closer, HRO reviews some of the 8 top trends will likely be topping the agenda next year.
- Continued Desires For Flexible Working & Home as the New Office
I think flexible working (In terms of both time and remote location) is going to be one of the big trends. This was already a trend that we were slowly seeing increasing before 2020; the COVID-19 crisis has really driven a massive acceleration in this trend towards remote working obviously driven by the crisis and a large portion of the workforce being forced almost overnight night to work remotely.
We are expecting an increased appetite for the move to continued home working even after the pandemic abates, and for flexible working requests. Organisations will continue to need to ensure a decent work from home policy, health and safety measures and supportive framework is in place—not just rely on the ‘emergency 2 pager’ when forced to go fully remote in a matter of days.
While I don’t expect the pandemic to transform every single company that has the possibility to become fully distributed to do so, I do believe that working from home (or anywhere else, once social distance measures are lifted) will remain an important part of how we work and many teams will have to adapt to a hybrid workforce model. This inevitably means leading – and accelerating – the infamous digital transformation that’s been an HR trend for years now.
- Embedding culture, belonging and connection in distributed workforces
A logical consequence of the increase in at-home workers is the push for HR to rethink many (if not all) of its practices to reinvent the employee experience. As such, the shift to remote work has an impact on several other HR trends.
Activities like recruiting and onboarding are forever changed. These activities, as well as performance management and monitoring and even firing decisions, have relied on in-person observation and conversations. HR needs to reinvent current practices to effectively deal with these situations in a digital world whilst maintaining the employee experience. Elements like work-life balance, wellbeing, connection, and collaboration will be crucial both for employee satisfaction and the optimisation of business outcomes.
In some ways colleagues across geographies are better able to collaborate. Video calls have meant that regional and national boarders have fallen away and people are working flexible hours to partner with colleagues across time zones.
However, the challenge for 2021, is to find ways to embed culture, create a sense of belonging and connection among a distributed workforce. This is critical for integrating new hires and creating succession learning, but also reaffirming the company identity and community. It has been said many ways, that ‘culture is what people do when no one is looking’, and when we’re working remotely, no one is looking. In some cases, this may call for us to revisit the current culture and/or company values so the emphasis reflects our new reality. Secondly, we have to talk about our culture and values a lot more. In order to embed and reinforce the identity and desired behaviours, we need to clarify behavioural expectations as well as recognise and reward where they show up.
Fundamentally, the way we have designed and structured our organisation will have to change. With no watercooler to gather around, spontaneous interactions – and the collaboration, creativity, and innovation they result in – are missed. Suitable surrogates for this kind of valuable communication are necessary if we hope to prevent all our Zoom calls and Teams meetings from becoming dismally, one-dimensionally functional and task-oriented.
- Continuing to Flex to the Covid-19 Pandemic
We’re going to have a Covid-19 vaccine developed and rolled out in the first 4-6 months of the year in the UK. As with this entire crisis, the HR department will be the team the business will look to for direction and leadership planning and preparing for a safe and phased reopening of work premises. Questions such as: how do we coax people back into work, how do we re-build employee morale, did we manage our furlough properly, how will we run our hybrid workforce model etc. those repercussions will be felt. Of course, many will want to return, but we’re going to be dealing with a sizeable minority that want to continue working from home. How do we respond? There will also be other aftermaths we’ll have to deal with such as bereavements, worsening mental health of those coming back and an increase in addictions among our employee group. It’s going to be a tough period for the HR team and line managers and one which needs considerable planning and time allocation.
- Wellbeing and Mental Health Will Continue to Gain Traction & Integration into the design of work itself
While of course 2020 has seen a massive shift in the way businesses operate, it has also posed significant personal difficulty to workers all over the world.
Employees are worried about their health and that of their loved ones, tense about the security of their jobs, concerned with juggling young children and partners at home while trying to get their work done, and dealing with a whole host of other stressors inherent in living through a pandemic.
Wellbeing and mental health awareness is already a big sector focus but will continue to gain traction as a topic for employees to consider as we move through the current pandemic response, and beyond that, once employees have learnt to cope with what’s going on and also move to recover from what’s going on. I think that HR will be pivotal in making sure that employees are looking after themselves as much as they possibly can.
Here are a handful of positive interventions that clients’ of HRO have put into place as part of their workplace wellbeing initiatives:
- employees who earn £70,000 or less annually were given a tax-free financial support of £500 to help cover unexpected costs related to working from home and invest in appropriate equipment
- Added 100% coverage for COVID-19 testing and related costs
- Increased sick pay to offer immediate paid medical leave for any employee diagnosed with Covid-19
- Introduced access to free mental health professionals
- Offered free financial planning support such as an e-solution to give workers more financial freedom as part of
- Expanded childcare support
- And the list goes on…
However, whilst the above programmes are great; being at the centre of the crisis is an enormous and weighty responsibility for any HR department. In order to succeed in the driver’s seat and maintain its newfound position into 2021 it will be imperative to look at integrating workers’ physical, mental, financial, and social health into the design of work itself rather than by purely addressing well-being with adjacent programs. Embedding well-being into work design helps workers experience well-being while they do their work, not just when they’re away from it. Deloitte reports ‘This is good for organisations as well as workers: Work that addresses the human need for quality of life can motivate people to give their best when on the job’.
- Challenges but also opportunities with new EU immigration rules
Although EU-derived employment laws are not expected to change immediately or radically as a result of Brexit, the new immigration rules will pose both challenges and opportunities for employers. On the one hand, the potential recruitment pool is dramatically narrowed as EU nationals will no longer be able to move freely to and from the UK for work. However, on the other hand, the new rules aim to make the process of employing a migrant worker simpler, fairer and faster. There will be no need for the role to be advertised, the minimum salary threshold will be lowered from £30,000 a year to £25,600 a year and the minimum skills level required will be lowered. For some employers, this may open up possibilities to hire skilled migrant workers from non-EU countries where this would have been more difficult under the old immigration regime.
- A Focus on Perennials
HRO expects to see an increase in Perennials, first mentioned by Gina Pell. Perennials are “a group of people of all ages, stripes, and types who go beyond stereotypes and make connections with each other and the world around them.”
To understand our workforce and develop our talent strategies, we should look beyond group differences and gather insights on individual employees’ interests, values, and aspirations. This also enables us to personalise how we manage people as HR professionals. This is something we will come back to in a later trend around personalisation.
- Creating Room for Personalisation
The shift we’ve seen this year in the way many of us work inevitably leads to employees creating their own optimal work environment. They arrange their work space at home as they see fit, they might work outside traditional office hours if that suits them better, and while some people may feel the need to check in with their colleagues for a virtual coffee each day, others may prefer doing so once a week.
When it comes to the actual work employees do, it seems natural that they’ll want to make some (small) adjustments there, too. This is where a concept such as job crafting comes in.
Job crafting is aimed at improving people’s jobs for the benefit of both the employee and the Company. It’s a technique that enables employees to improve their job in five different ways; in terms of tasks, skills, purpose, relations, and wellbeing.
The job crafting model
HR Optimisation believes that giving employees room to take ownership of their role will be essential for job satisfaction and productivity in 2021 and beyond, boosting both employee success and that of their employer.
- Purpose-Driven Organisations
Wrapping up our HR trends with one that is about purpose. Though working from home seems to be here to stay, many employers fear a drop in productivity and commitment as the trend continues. According to PwC, 79% of company leaders believe that purpose is the key to success. The purpose-driven organisation may be the remedy for many of the challenges of motivation that home workers, and pandemic weary employees will increasingly face.
In 2020 we saw that organisations that embraced purpose were able to anchor their workers, teams, and leaders to a common understanding of what they were trying to accomplish. These company’s used purpose as a driving force to sift through competing priorities, unite workers under common goals, drive belonging, and focus energy and resources on their most pressing organisational and societal goals.
These kinds of companies bring their purpose to the core of their company and operations. This means that decisions, conversations, and behaviour across all levels need to be integrated with that purpose.
A great example is Barry-Wehmiller, a global supplier of manufacturing technology and services, led by Bob Chapman. The company’s guiding principles of leadership are “we measure success by the way we touch the lives of others”. From a people perspective, the company focuses on learning, listening, empathy building, and actively works to create a service mindset for its team members.
Other interventions include value-based recruitment. HRO clients that do this, assess to what degree candidate’s values align with company values.
These values are then continuously emphasised. This happens through exemplary behaviour by leaders, through HR practices like leadership development, employee training, and performance management, and they should be integrated in meetings and company events. There remains a strong role for HR professional in integrating these practices and in continuously reinforcing them through 2021 and beyond.
There you have it: our top 8 HR trends for 2021 and beyond. I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are on these so feel free to share your feedback in the comments with me on hello@HROptimisation.co.uk
Hannah Powell
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