No more 9 to 5 Working Hours
Flexible work hours for employees is in trends for a couple of years. This trend will be reshaped as employees will ask HR to hold employees accountable for their work more than the time they came in and went out. Since, now employees come from Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities that resulted in the myriad nuclear families, HR will keep on getting requests for more personalised Flexible working hours so that employees can balance their work life and family life. So now HR needs to pay more attention to flexible working hours. 9 to 5 was a usual point of discussion in HR departments among HR’s, Hiring Managers, Talent recruiters some 10 years ago. With independence of work in demand, millenials will prefer freelance and short term contracts giving them flexibility, freedom and more exposure in terms of work.
Being Remote Action
Workforce and Employee diversity will dominate due to globalization, multi-content offices and due to the speed of the internet. Remote work also helps HR to reduce the cost on company.
Technology in HR
Customer Service, IT management, Food delivery wildly employee Chatbots. In 2020 HR will employ Chatbots to on-board employees, and assist employees with questions or concerns regarding payslips, compensation, and/or anything that an HR deem fit. Such Chat bots will reduce the burden on HR and thus will boost productivity of employees and HR leading to a better culture within the organization. Chatbots will ultimately make businesses more profitable. HR usually has a large amount of data about things like resume, recruitment profiling, salary slips, employee attendance, employee leaves and KPI’s. Analysis of data intelligently can accurately predict decisions on hirings and promotions without prejudice. Thus HR will now suffer less with confusion on data ultimately making an HR more productive and the workplace smarter.
Much of the process in the HR department IN 2020 will be driven by connected offices and automation via IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data and this will reach new heights by 2030. Employees easily bypass the Biometric Attendance Management System and RFID access control system thus always leading to unpredictable and wrong results, lowering productivity of HR leading to more work in HR departments. The best option for HR business professionals is to move forward with more advanced technologies that give seamless results. Smartphones and Laptops have already revolutionized the computing world. Punching attendance via in accurate biometric or easily cloned RFID card systems will be completely eliminated and HR will move to punching attendance via tap of the phones. This will give HR accurate results. In 2020 in HR a hardware device that communicates directly with the software providing AI-driven solutions reinvent the entire HR process across industries including HR in Insurance, Coworking, Real estate, Banking, manufacturing units, and more. Such an extensive technology will have a lot of advantages in HR.
An automated assistant that we all know are Chatbots. These are unconventional till now in HR but in 2020 years would change every HR department to help HR save cost, time and money. As chatbots will answer FAQ automatically to the candidates. Screening a large pool of applicants usually eats up a lot of time of an HR thus becoming a complex and frustrating task. However automated decision models will assist HR to filter resumes and pre-screen candidates based on the Job description and skills. Thus the HR department will move towards an unbiased approach in hiring decisions. Since AI, ML decision model will help HR in unbiased screening,the quality of hires will become better and organizations would employ more productive employees in 2020.
Analysis of Data will be an every adopting model for HR departments to make decisions better for HR. HR professionals can attract and retain best talent with automated data decision models. In 2020 technology will boost HR with infinite possibilities in identifying trends and patterns on employee productivity, employee attendance, leave frequency, and employee performance KPIs. Data analytics with a good decision model will change the HR department forever. The solutions for HR systems on the user as well as admin side are very complex, not everybody likes them due to the complexities involved in them. For example, a biometric attendance system is usually unhygienic, people put dirty fingers on the scanner and change exchange bacterias with each other. This will ultimately lead to bad health and an unproductive workplace.
HR’s are now moving for systems that are simple because employees have to be happy when they experience with the company at the time of Check-In. HR always does work with good faith, however many times, employees doubt their intention. The analytical tools that track employees go to an extent on pointing out smaller and smaller mistakes, thus it creates a feeling of lack of trust. Employee morale is degraded, performance is poor, thus ultimately loss to the company.
Employee inclusive approach is more beneficial and hence telling them why adopting this process benefits them and the entire company.
Inclusion & HR Leadership
Leadership teams also learn like employees and hence due to busy schedules they are unaware of what’s going inside the teams? Here, HR plays a crucial role. A role in leading the leadership team to create a management that help foster the growth of each and every employee. Change will always start at top and HR has to lead the leadership by example. As an instance, I always ask my managers to keep me updated who is unhappy to work with us and why? Some answers are prejudiced and some are without prejudice, but what matters at the end of the day for the HR is the right feedback it can give to the top management that help them navigate business in the best interest of the company. Productivity is at the core of any business. HR are given the responsibility to navigate the teams to bring results otherwise replace the source. While hiring is a guess for HR but firing is certainty but it is really difficult for them to be great.
In the pursuit of growth, HR has to drive the employees in a way business interest is always kept on priority. However, this sometimes makes HR a political topic in the organization. Such politics within the team impacts HR. Hence, to make work more productive it is better to find the top performers and also to find the Political mastermind. Throwing away negativity in the garbage is the best tool an HR can employ to boost the morale of the company. Corporate Social Responsibility is often seen as the only way to impact communities and society. However, often the HR navigates this in a way that strengthens the social responsibilities of employees. Employees are the biggest investment of an HR, hence HR knows very well that if given an opportunity every employee would love to contribute to the causes they care about. Some employees like to help Old Age Citizens, some love to contribute to the growth of underprivileged children and for many air pollution is the biggest challenge to solve.
So give them responsibility and some time off so they can contribute to the society and community they care about.
Inclusivity is not only about lowering the gap between men and women but also about respecting and giving equal work opportunity to all irrespective of their religion, culture, race, language, state of health and more. If you look at the history of mankind The greatest innovation in the history of mankind was made possible by the team of diverse people coming from different cultures, speaking multiple languages, belonging to different sex and races. Exclusivity only reduces human potential, hence ALL IN! Many of my Global HR leader friends have followed the approach and they have seen tremendous growth in employees as well as in the business of the corporate they serve.
The trend has been for real since past a decade but now brands are more and more aware and are focusing on diversity of the workforce. When I say diversification, I imagine that habitants of the company will be diverse in terms of time, on payroll, off payroll, third party vendors, remote employees, consultants. Because more has to be done and as an HR you want all to “Fall in Love” with your Brand.
Reskilling HR
HR was a manual task that included paper based employment application, to developing process, designing favourable policies, to now a Strategic and technical partner to the CEO and Board of Directors. HR has been neglected both by employees and by CEOs, but now their presence is even more significant. The “Round Table” need them to bring business perspective keeping in mind the interest of employees as well. Hence HR is not just another position rather it is a leadership position, a position that holds emotion like a mother. HR business professionals also need to be technology skilled so they have create the change that takes the company forward. With automation HR now have to be reskilled and HR job loss will not happen. Any automation will reduce the human error, it will assist the HR. Automation will never lead to unemployment of HR rather HR will be more a technology job then manual. In the upcoming days every CEO, and COO will give a chair in the meeting to the HR to involve them in strategizing and their understanding on human psychology when it comes to expanding into market and increase profitability. So HR will become the next most sought after job in any company.
