To all the HR Professionals out there - hands up which ones of you have had to make changes to your ways of working and employee cohort since the start of 2020? For those of you who didn't put your hand up, you're in the minority. If the events that ushered in this decade have taught us anything, it's that businesses needs systems and processes in place that enable it to bend and flex under duress. If the art of workforce shaping isn't on your radar yet, it should be. In this week's blog we explore what KPMG has nominated as being the 'defining challenge' of 2020 and beyond. This is the future of HR best practice.

Deloitte recently published a fantastic article about the increasing importance of applying your company’s values in relation to people, processes and technology. The take-away: "In a time of perpetual technological disruption, earning (and keeping) the trust of all your stakeholders is a 360 degree challenge as well as being a massive opportunity." Ensuring that you apply and use technology in an ethical manner, especially if you're an NFP, NGO or charity, is a trend that is predicted to increase in relevance (and necessity). As we discussed in our last Blog about Edelman's 2020 Trust Barometer report, trust is hard to gain and easy to lose, so let's take a look at what this evolving trend around technology means for HR best practice in your business.

Edelman has been publishing their annual Trust Barometer Report for 20 years now, and the 2020 report illustrates what you might call an 'epic fail' in trust across the board. No institutions are seen as being both competent AND ethical. Only business is seen as being competent and only NGOs are seen as ethical. Add to that the fact that 56% percent of respondents believe that capitalism as it currently operates today is doing more harm than good and you can see that there is both a significant need for change as well as a tremendous opportunity for transformation. It shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that trust and transparency are more critical to success than ever, especially given current circumstances. So let's take a look at the highlights from the 2020 Trust Barometer Report and how they matter to you.

Every year, Deloitte conducts an extensive study on the emerging and prevailing trends in human capital and the future of work. Each year, the post we write on our HR blog about that report is always one of the most popular. In 2020, the Human Capital Trends Report highlights an intensifying combination of economic, social, and political issues impacting HR and business leaders. These factors continue to put pressure on businesses to operate in a more socially oriented manner (a continuation of 2019's trend, which we covered in a previous HR blog post), and to reinvent their organisations around a more ethical and human focus. Let's take a look at the highlights of this year's report and discover the HR metrics that matter in 2020 and beyond.

Configuration is King. This is especially true for commercial / business solutions (as opposed to those we use for our personal needs). Like most things in life, they're designed fit within the bell curve so as to meet most of the needs of most of the businesses that use the product. The problem with that is, the majority of organisations have a unique operational fingerprint and a 'one-size-fits-all' solution just doesn't work for them. That's where the 'configurability' of the software you use comes into play. Pay attention, because going forward - software configurability is going to play a critical role in the things that matter most to business: time, money, user experience and future-proofing your organisation. In this week's HR Blog we unpack HR software configuration and why it matters for HR best practice.

Ensuring that you've got the right people, in the right place, at the right time, with a compensation or fee structure that works for your business is an ongoing challenge for many organisations. Aligning all those factors in times of rapidly evolving circumstances is even more difficult. Especially if you also have to juggle compliance or regulatory changes. That's a recipe for high levels of stress and a greater margin for error. Especially if you're trying to model multiple different scenarios with multiple different employee types in very short timeframes. A sudden change in economic circumstances (or restrictions on working conditions), makes it abundantly clear; you need tools that make it easy for you to model and report on remuneration efficiently, without needing to resort to spreadsheets or paper shuffling. This week's HR Blog explores remuneration modelling and HR automation in times of change.

HR Dashboards are an indispensable tool for HR professionals. They provide critical data visualisation for relevant metrics across the entire employee lifecycle, including hiring, retention, onboarding, performance, and more. Today's #HRTech makes it possible to purchase dashboard apps to integrate with your other business systems. Or if you have developers within your organisation you can build your own dashboards using excel or by developing your own system. But really, what you want is an HR system with customisable Dashboards built in to your HR software itself. In this HR Blog we look at the benefit of using dashboards to get a real-time overview of your data so that you can gain valuable business intelligence to run an agile and successful organisation using HR automation.

Productive HR reporting is critical to the ongoing success of every business. Developing an HR Dashboard that visualises your HR data in a way that tells the story of your business to the right people in the right way, is your pathway to growth and success. However, it is incredibly difficult for anyone in a business to make informed decisions when HR business partners and other stakeholders lack insight into their own operations and employees. To ensure that leadership and management have the information they need to make informed decisions, HR Professionals need to provide HR data in a way that informs, engages, inspires and persuades. In this week's HR Blog, we explore how to build the right Dashboards for productive reporting on your HR Metrics.