Which HR Trends Matter To Your Business in 2021?

Since 2017, we've been publishing an annual blog about which HR trends matter and what to keep your eye on in the coming year. In 2020, trend predictions went out the window and everyone was just focused on putting one foot in front of the other. It was a year in which necessities became trends whether we wanted them to or not. Because the annual trends blog is always one of our most popular, it is back for 2021 (and there are lots of interesting developments on the horizon for HR). This year was a year of significant disruption and the challenge for 2021 and beyond is to integrate all the changes into a cohesive, efficient, integrated, automated whole. Let's take a look at which HR trends matter to your business in 2021 and beyond.

Before we get started, if you want to take a look at the trends from previous years, here they are:

• Which HR trends matter to your business in 2017.

• Which HR trends matter to your business in 2018.

• Which HR trends matter to your business in 2019.

Now let's take a look at what you need to keep your eye on for 2021.

Gartner's Top 5 Priorities For HR Leaders

• 68% Building critical skills and competencies: Traditional ways of predicting skill needs aren’t working. Employees need more skills for every job, and many of those skills are new. Many employees aren’t learning the right new skills - for their personal development, or the benefit of the organisation.

• 46% Organisational design and change management: Work design, focused for years on efficiency, has left many organisations with rigid structures, workflows, role design and networks that don’t meet today’s needs (or flex with fast-changing conditions). Employees end up suffering the effects in various forms of work friction.'

• 44% Current and future leadership bench: Networking is a great way to provide support for employees, but networks often lack diversity in role, skill level and experience, and have limited involvement from senior leaders. Intentionally creating growth-focused diversity networks supports under-represented talent and yields benefits for individual employees, leadership and the organisation.

• 32% Future of work: The events of 2020 will have a lasting impact on the future of work. The question for HR leaders is how much these trends have and will alter strategic goals and plans, and what immediate action and longer-term adjustments must be made as a result.

• 28% Employee experience: Amid the shift to remote work and hybrid workforce models, HR must preserve company culture and ensure employee experience keeps up with employees’ expectations and needs. One key consideration is the value proposition of the office versus other work locations.

Not surprisingly, cost optimisation considerations feature more widely than any leadership plans for growth throughout 2021. Here's what leaders will be focusing their time and resources on during the coming year:

• 65% Improve operational excellence.

• 64% Grow the business.

• 54% Execute business transformations.

• 50% Optimise costs.

• 47% Innovate for success.

• 15% Manage risk and regulatory demands.

Gartner organised survey results into four key themes that they believe will be the focus for 2021 and beyond. If you're in the planning stages for next year, here's what you need to consider:

• The new world of remote work: HR must move beyond simple questions of how remote work operates. An effective hybrid workforce model requires HR to develop and evolve critical managerial and leadership roles and responsibilities, new organisational structures and virtual HR strategies.

• Efficient resilience: HR leaders now realise that efficient organisations are actually fragile organisations. Rather than striving for efficiency, leading HR professionals recognise they need to build resilient organisations, leaders and employees so they are able to bounce back and thrive during disruptions.

• Building a diverse leadership bench: Despite the attention placed on building a more diverse workforce, progress has been slow to halting. The workforce and the communities in which organisations operate expect more. The pace of progress must speed up.

• The new employee value proposition: Employees’ expectations of their employers have shifted. Mental health, purpose and social responsibility are now critical components of the value proposition. HR executives must navigate the new realities of the labor market to meet their talent needs and the expectation of their employers.

Josh Bersin's Perspective On The HR Trends to Watch

Thought leader Josh Bersin has had a lot to say about the transformative impact of this year, not just on HR, but on our lives in general. He's made a few key call outs (and predictions) about HR and technology, highlighting something we've been working on since launching Subscribe-HR over a decade ago. What's Josh been focused on this year? HR software as a platform (not a product). As Bersin points out, a platform creates the most adaptive and scalable business model and gives customers the best value for their money.

If you think about all the requirements business has in relation to system functionality, the scope is enormous: recruiting, contingent worker hiring, reskilling, job redeployment, organisational redesign, performance management, workforce shaping (to name just a small few). In the changing world of work there are a lot of different functionality that HR needs to manage the entire employee lifecycle of all the different types of employees most organisations have today.

There may be many niche solutions in the marketplace that manage a single process well, but an HR platform gives companies the capacity to do everything under one roof. That is the most efficient and cost-effective way to do business. It is also the reason why we've built the Subscribe-HR system the way we have. We created our HR software as a platform right from the start, and we've been honing it for 10 years. It is a much longer and harder road, but well worth the effort because the benefit to our customers is immeasurable. The marketplace is only just starting to catch up with this notion.

Top 10 Lists From Around the Web

We did quite a bit of reading around the web to decide on exactly which trends will matter in the coming year. Not surprisingly, there are quite a few other top 10 lists on the airwaves. Here are three that we think contain some valuable insight into what's coming over the horizon towards HR.

Here's the HR Trend Institute's top 10:

1. Ethical leadership.

2. The search for the anti-fragile personality.

3. Goodbye HR business partner.

4. The hybrid office.

5. Increasing risk of detachment (with remote workers).

6. Skill mapping: looking for adjacent skills.

7. More nudging than policing.

8. The 'personal user guide.'

9. Digital tracking/the return of Big Brother.

10. VR breakthrough.

And this is what Digital HR Tech has to say:

1. Home as the new office.

2. Rethinking HR.

3. Reinventing the employee experience.

4. Perennials - employees of all ages.

5. Learning as a driver of business success.

6. HR in the driver’s seat.

7. Effortless shared services.

8. Creating room for personalisation.

9. Acing analytics.

10. Purpose-driven organisations.

Finally, here are some of the things Finances Online think you should be focusing on:

1. Consumerisation in the workplace.

2. New ways to engage employees.

3. Embracing the gig economy.

4. Employee wellness is a priority.

5. More data-driven HR.

6. A focus on reskilling workers.

7. An increasingly diverse workforce.

8. Increased investment in leadership development.

9. Focusing on internal talent mobility.

10. Moving towards continuous performance management.

What Does Your Business Need to Focus on in 2021?

Based our experience working with customers this year, as well as the trends identified by other experts, the top five considerations that will become critical success factors throughout the next year are:

Hybrid work, workforce and workplace: Adaptability might just be the word of the year. In 2020 businesses and employees had to adapt in ways and at rates never before seen in the workplace. What was once considered fringe has become the norm. What was once thought impossible or unlikely has become an everyday occurrence. If adaptability was the word for 2020, hybrid looks like it will become the word for 2021. Gone are the days when an organisation's workforce consisted of a majority of full-time employees who worked for the same company, in the same location for life. In today's world of work there are full-time, part-time, casual, fixed-term contractors, shiftworkers, daily and weekly hires, gig workers, volunteers (and more). This tapestry of employee types is set to continue to expand as the way we work transforms, and it is HR that will be called on the manage this workforce (and have the flexibility to be able to shape and reshape on a dime as needs arise).

The notion that the office is the only place where work gets done has also been transformed this year. While many companies will likely still retain physical offices, it's clear that they will not be the same. There will be a change in the way we work in them and how physical structures and office layouts will be used for collaboration. For example, one strategy might be to have specific days for in-person meetings and collaboration, and then other days allocated for remote work. In-person meetings might be reserved for brainstorming sessions, introducing new projects, or team-building exercises, while remote days would be for work that can be performed individually. The office could be redesigned and reorganised by getting rid of cubicles and creating more collaborative meeting spaces. In the future, the office will essentially become a business centre.

Reskilling workers and talent mobility: According to McKinsey, 62% of executives 'believe they will need to retrain or replace more than a quarter of their workforce by 2023.' In this day and age, it’s impractical to expect employees to spend their entire careers with the same skill set. It’s the responsibility of HR and learning and development (L&D) teams to ensure that organisations have the skilled workforce they need to be competitive in the market.

Not only that, reskilling can be cheaper than rehiring. In a recent survey, 95% of learning professionals reported spending less than $10,000 to reskill an employee. On the other hand, research by the Work Institute found that employee turnover costs 33% of the departing employee’s salary. That’s a significant cost that only increases with salary.

Moreover, employees with fresh knowledge and skills may be scarce, hard to attract and expensive to hire. Research by Indeed found that 42% of employers are concerned about finding qualified candidates. Considering the pace of technical advancements, even new hires will need to update their skills relatively quickly. Reskilling existing employees is more cost-effective than hiring new ones, and it helps make employers more competitive.

Managing performance in the new world of work: How do you make performance goals fair and meaningful in this topsy-turvy, ever-changing, uncertain-future environment? How should you think about bonus pay and incentives? The old metrics often don't make sense, and adding pay into the mix is likely going to upset people.

The new approach to performance management will have to be more collaborative, adaptive and individualised based on conditions on the ground. How does that look in practice? Agile collaborative goals that morph as conditions change, ongoing conversations, timely recognition and informal dialogue on a weekly basis as well as scheduled (quarterly, semi annual, annual) reviews with accountability and incentive adjustments.

Wellness, resilience and mental health in the new world of work: Resilience and adaptability are are the latest hot ticket characteristics to cultivate in the workplace (and also in life in general). Without them, mental health will, as we have learned this year, suffer significantly.

Poor mental health in working professionals has now become a burning issue. Studies show that as many as 83% of professionals in the US suffer from work-related stress. The challenges of 2020 have only increased stress, anxiety, loneliness, and depression among the workforce.

Workplace wellness programs can no longer limit their focus to physical health alone. What you will need is a holistic approach to wellness that targets both the mind and body. In 2021 and beyond, corporate wellness programs must look into employees’ mental health.

The rise of codeless HR software as an essential technology solution: A ‘no-code HR software platform’ refers to a software development platform or solution that requires low to no amount of coding experience to configure it. By significantly reducing the amount of hard coding required, codeless applications are delivered in a fraction of the time: hours and days instead of weeks and months. Costs are significantly cut as a result because this process supports faster, more adaptable delivery of changes and updates. The result is that customers can quickly reconfigure their HR technology to adapt to their needs at any point in time. And they can do this on an ongoing basis

Subscribe-HR's codeless HR software platform was created with simplicity and speed in mind. Unlike other out-of-the-box alternatives, applications and platforms built using no-code technology are flexible and scalable enough to adapt to changing business needs.

HR teams, even during a crisis, can benefit significantly from codeless software. They not only become more efficient in their everyday tasks, valuable time is freed up to focus on crisis management issues and supporting employees rather than wrestling with software.

Does your organisation need a solution that can flex and change with the needs of your business? Codeless, configurable, cloud HR software it the most adaptable #HRtech you can find. If you would like to see how Subscribe-HR's HR platform can transform your business, you're invited to explore our suite of 13 solutions from the comfort of your desk.

Image credit: Gartner Top 5 Priorities for HR Leaders in 2021