Global Workforce Survey 2020 study by ADP Research Institute with over 26, 594 participants with over 1000 participants per country. In the global engagement scale, Singapore had a sharp decline of 9% from 20% to 11%. On the other hand, Singapore workers scored at 19% that had resilience. One interesting finding was that the impact of covid-19 did not have any effects on workplace resilience.
Here are our curated top 5 trends in Human Resource are as follows :
Trend 1 : Prioritise On Resilience & Safety
The safe return back to office workplace is of top priority due to the impact of COVID-19 on the way that office spaces need to be.As such, the importance of organisations who take worker's safety as number one would see an increase in employees feeling safe to return to the workplace.
The worker of 2021 needs to balance conflicting priorities such as managing stress, childcare constraints and fears of contracting covid-19 on top of fulfilling their roles and responsibilities at work. This calls on the focus on building organisational resilience through upscaling or upskilling one's workforce to increase a worker's repertoire of skillset to accomplish different responsibilities,
Trend 2 : Push For Diversity
With the enhancement in virtual and boundary-less technology such as video-conferencing, virtual collaborative tools and cloud recording capabilities, the ability for organisations to interact with transnational teams has been made easier to communicate with teams miles away. These has given rise to the possibility of expansion of business to other countries which means the increase in managing of diversity.
Key Findings from ADP research institute showed the following :
Employers increasingly sought data insights on the racial and cultural demographics of their workforce accounting for a 74% increase in searches. Employers increased searches for gender-based demographics by 42%.
With greater data transparency comes accountability. DiversityInc has seen an uptick in the number of businesses seeking partners to close the gaps in their workforce. There has been a noted increase in requests for DEI consulting, content support and training support.
Trend 3 : The Strong Need For Creativity
The call for a bolder and exponential HR by Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Report has been fuelled by the outbreak of COVID-19 which forced HR Organisations to creatively solve the complexity of shifting from traditional HR to agile HR functions. The enforcement of workplace policies and standards has to shift to accommodate the rise of the hybrid workforce in the sense of both skills and location of work. Leaders, HR and employees have to develop creative solutions to teething problems pre and post COVID to help increase organisational resilience.
Trend 4 : Personal Experience rather than Employee Engagement
A logical consequence of the increase in at-home workers (apart from a spike in office furniture sales and Zoom accounts) is the push for HR to rethink many (if not all) of its practices. Work and office are becoming more disconnected ,keeping employees engaged while they are working remote requires a conscious effort. You could argue, that by working from home it becomes more difficult to create a clear boundary between work and private life. At the same time the connection to work becomes looser. Boss and colleagues are out of sight most of the time. Video meetings help a bit but not enough.This means that the way of engaging employees is dramatically different from than that of work-from-home.
Leaders and team manager need to work hand-in-hand with the HR team to create platforms for developing a personal-experience toolkit to reduce the effects of detachment from the team and the entire organisation. The focus on personal experience allows for customisation to the user (i.e. employees) rather than to look at them as a whole collection of people.
Trend 5 : Adjacent and Hybridised Skills
We know the importance of future proofing ourselves and the HR functions are also not spared. Companies now see the importance of developing people in a three-dimensional aspect rather than grooming them to be a specialist in one domain. The changes in processes can be seen in the various areas :
In recruitment: if you are looking for people with skills that are rare, you can widen your search by including adjacent skills in your search
Career development: You can give people suggestions which skills they can develop with the greatest chance of success
Redeploying people: Some skills might be obsolete, but maybe adjacent skills that can easily be developed are still in demand.
Here are the top 5 trends of 2021, what is your take on 2021? How would HR evolve being 2021? Subscribe to our Alvigor blog for more articles like this.