The Future of HR is Digital

In these turbulent and tech-driven times, the world is rapidly transforming, altering how we go about everyday life and work. The COVID-19 crisis might be the most powerful catalyst of change, but it’s not the only one.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, and automation infiltrate every part of our lives and generate new standards and trends. These also affect the world of work and digitalisation speed.

As a result, HR has to manage recruitment and talents in a hybrid setting where technology has one of the most influential roles. It’s what made the Future of Work one of the most discussed terms lately.

The uncertainty that the pandemic brought exacerbated our innate need to make projections of how things could look in a few decades. Hence, the Future of Work represents a global intent to forecast how employees and the workplace could evolve in the years to come.

Automation means that machines will likely replace human workers in all the jobs that are prone to mechanisation. Moreover, the physical offices and traditional work we knew before coronavirus caught the world in its clutches might become a distant memory.

Instead, telework and gig workers will be prevalent, and 85 percent of jobs that will exist in 2030 have not been invented yet. Because of that, human resources will face various new trends and lasting transformations that require data literacy.

How is the Future of Work Influencing HR Trends?

Although 2020 unfolded in a way no one would expect, it helped us understand how significant technology will be in this decade. Without top-notch tech tools and gadgets, it would be even harder to navigate the pandemic.

Another thing that last year taught us is that it’s critical to make future predictions and prepare for what’s to come. That way, HR professionals can align their strategies with the most probable outcomes and use accurate techniques.

David Green, the co-author of Excellence in People Analytics, assessed HR 2021 trend predictions. Here are the top ten forecasts Greene identified that could help us understand how HR may evolve.

1. The Future of Work

According to Green, the Future of Work is here, starting the era of hybrid work. He understands that HR professionals should identify the assignments employees could perform remotely with more productivity.

However, Green also poses an intriguing question: will the Future of Work ever stop being a thing?

2. HR in the Spotlight

The pandemic made companies understand how essential HR functions are, placing this industry in the spotlight. That creates a challenge for human resources professionals, as they should lead the digital transformation and ensure workplaces become more human-centric.

3. The Importance of Well-being

Green notices the increasing attention well-being programmes received during the COVID crisis. Nevertheless, he also notes that HR leaders should continue highlighting the importance of wellness and delivering stellar strategies that help employees handle stress and burnout.

4. People Analytics Essential for Every Organisation

During the pandemic, People Analytics (PA) saved lives by shifting focus to employee well-being and helping businesses stay afloat. Because of that, PA will continue growing and becoming more complex, making them essential for every organisation in the post-COVID era.

5. Ethical Employee Monitoring

Remote work gave rise to employee monitoring technologies that should track their commitment while working from home. Green explains that ethics charters will be a must for businesses that operate remotely because that allows fair use of people data.

6. EX-centered HR

Employee experience is one of the most crucial HR responsibilities. Because of that, human resources will work closely with IT and other functional areas to ensure meaningful and customised experiences in the years to come.

7. On-Demand Employee Learning

Digital transformation will influence the future of employee learning, creating a requirement for on-demand, personalised, virtual, and multi-format platforms.

8. The Rise of Talent Marketplace

High-performing companies understand the importance of employee skills, motivating them to create a talent marketplace that focuses on internal mobility. These programmes will blend employee learning and career with personalised technologies that enable skill development.

9. Empathetic Leadership and Inclusive Company Culture

Green explains how the pandemic reminds us that empathetic leaders help foster healthier and more inclusive workplace cultures. Naturally, HR has a crucial role in holding CEOs accountable and creating diverse work environments.

10. HR and Data Literacy

The Future of Work implies that data savviness and literacy are essential skills for those businesses that want to thrive in 2021 and beyond. Agility could become a lasting HR trend as it ensures HR professionals can deliver higher business value and navigate digital transformation.

The Tight-Knit Connection Between the Future of Work and Agility

Tech breakthroughs are at the centre of the Future of Work. Artificial intelligence, automation, and digital transformation have the most intense influence on how we’ll work in the decades ahead, making it essential to adapt.

The future workforce will operate in a technology-driven world that excels in remote and hybrid work environments. The old paradigms no longer apply in the new era.

Because of that, it’s of paramount importance which route will your company take as that could decide its endurance in the incoming years. The Future of Work is an announcement of fast-evolving workplaces that don’t rely on manual processes and techniques.

If you fail to understand why agility plays a significant role in the future of recruitment, you could lose your employees and talent pool to those who do. Pushing for traditional methods and lengthy procedures could be detrimental to your work as the future requires responsiveness and a data-driven approach.

As an HR leader, you’re at the focal point of this transformation and should adapt to recruitment that relies on digital strategies and experimental initiatives. Hence, it’s essential to adopt an agile mindset and drive HR in a digital direction.

That is the best way to support a collaborative culture and ensure every function within HR prioritises speed and adaptiveness.

Yet, it might be challenging to identify practical initiatives that enable HR to navigate and leverage digital transformation. These are the top five tips on how to make human resources in your organisation more data-driven.

5 Ways to Make HR More Data Literate

The Future of Work highlights the need to derive meaningful information from data and understand how to apply it. For HR, data literacy is a non-negotiable as it enhances decision-making and drives actions that generate business value.

Follow these five tips to make HR in your organisation more agile and data literate.

1. Integrate Employee Data

The majority of companies gathers and monitors HR data to improve their processes. Yet, not many use the most relevant analytics techniques. If you want to keep up with the maturity curve of the data you collect, consider integration that allows you to create actionable observations.

Identify employee behavioural trends by assessing relations data and blending the results with other organisational and business analytics you have. The integration enables you to discover connections between team performance and business results and tweak your strategies.

2. Evaluate Business Data and Spot Performance Trends

In HR, data can be your best friend because every department, unit, and employee generates pieces of information that you can assess and detect challenges and effective methods.

For instance, if employee retention rates fluctuate across your organisation, you could leverage performance data to understand that variance. One office might have a higher retention rate than others due to its efficient onboarding process. You could use this information to replicate the procedure across your organisation.

3. Provide People Analytics Training

If you want your HR department to be more data-driven and data literate, it’s crucial to provide interactive People Analytics training. That could help HR professionals better understand and use PA and acquire data literacy abilities.

Leverage content curation and use analytics and data training sources that are available for free online. However, your program should tackle the importance of data across all HR functions, not only people analytics. Thus, you could use gamification methods to make training more engaging and enhance performance quicker.

4. Internal and External Knowledge Sharing Events

Encourage peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and interactions by organising internal and external events that help HR professionals improve analytics and data skills. Achieve that by bringing together HR practitioners and PA specialists or connecting HR with PA industry leaders or working groups.

These events allow your team to adopt elementary skills or become more data-savvy by learning how HR departments in other companies run PA and evaluate data. You can speed up knowledge acquisition and retention by focusing on specific data literacy abilities and making sessions available to non-attendees by recording them.

5. Encourage Upskilling

People Analytics specialists are typically a separate group within HR departments. However, if you embed PA into HR functions, you’ll facilitate upskilling. Allow HR professionals to work in the same teams as PA specialists, enabling them to run analytics and data assignments within the business context by themselves.

As a result, you’ll internalise the process of learning and help the HR department improve data literacy and analytical thinking. Moreover, they will start prioritising the data-first approach, which is beyond advantageous for the Future of Work.

Shoogle Your HR Teams to Increase Agility

Helping your HR teams be more data-driven, agile, and data literate shouldn’t be a lonely task. As a mobile app with comprehensive platform features, Shoogle can help you assess and leverage your data in a creative way.

Thanks to its Gauge the Mood tool, Shoogle enables fast feedback and eliminates the need for lengthy surveys and questions. You can use this feature to collect data at the individual level, department level, organisation level, and Shoogle community level and later extract meaning from these insights.

Moreover, Shoogle allows personalisation that you can leverage to run analytic events, gather user interest information, or create data collections. Pause traditional methods and start Shoogling to boost HR team agility and increase business value.

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As an industry that focuses on people management and analytics, HR evolution in the Future of Work is inevitable. Outmoded techniques will lose efficiency, encouraging human resources to opt for a fully digital approach, allowing data-driven processes and more accurate strategies.

During this journey, HR priorities will focus on becoming more agile and learning how to use technology to derive meaningful insights from data and generate higher business value.

If you want to onboard the process of HR digital evolution, choose a creative way of collecting data and get Shoogle now.