We closed out 2020 with two articles on the trends shaping 2021.
We wanted to open the new year with a piece on the agendas HR will focus on in 2021 and beyond — in other words, what it needs to be ready for in the short and medium term. We hope it is useful to the community.
Which Agendas Will Top HR's List?
1) Change Leadership
We can now talk about an entirely new chapter in HR's own evolution. The eras of HR as a business partner and strategic HR are drawing to a close. Of course, I am not saying these two approaches will disappear overnight, but you can expect a different HR model to gradually become dominant: the "Digital HR Approach That Leads Change."
Going forward, HR organizations are expected to carry two core responsibilities:
- Managing change well, with the capacity to redesign every process accordingly
- Making greater use of digital HR applications that bring speed and flexibility, and gaining more influence over the company's decision-making through data-driven HR management
Let us also underline that these two responsibilities are the two key factors that will determine "HR's productivity." Productive HR organizations will use all the resources we discuss here as efficiently as possible to serve "the employee's experience and its continuous improvement."
"Change Leadership" Is Now Front and Center!
The digital transformation journeys companies and the business world have been through over the last year or two, employees' needs and expectations that shifted especially with the pandemic, remote work and flexible models, economic uncertainty and the VUCA world — all of this has brought us to a turning point. And it is exactly at this point that we can say HR's role, and what is expected of it, has changed as well.
If we put technological advances, digital transformation, remote work and the impact of the pandemic together, HR's most important role today will be to redesign all of these changes inside organizations in the way that best fits each company's own reality. HR professionals will act as "change agents" so that employees can adapt to what has happened, and to what is coming in the near future, as quickly and smoothly as possible. In short, HR's most fundamental role will be, quite literally, "Leading Change."
On the management side, finding the leaders who will manage and drive all this change — hiring them from outside when necessary, developing them internally when necessary — continuously supporting their personal growth, and coaching and supporting them whenever they need it are also high on the agenda. The digital leaders a company has will be especially important here. I covered these topics in detail in my articles "New Generation Leadership Approaches" and "Digital Leadership" for anyone who would like to take a look.
2) Talent Shortage
On the other hand, HR does face serious challenges. The most important of these is reaching qualified talent and putting it in the right seat — the increasingly pressing issue of the "Talent Shortage" in recent years.
According to Manpower Global's annual "Talent Shortage" surveys, companies now struggle a great deal to find suitable candidates for their open positions. In 2018 the global average was 45%, while Turkey ranked 6th in the world at 66% — the highest scores in 12 years.
According to the 2019 results, even though the figure for Turkey improved somewhat (51%), it is not enough to take the talent shortage off the agenda. And this is only the talent shortage in the classic sense. If we add the concept of "digital talent" (where the numbers are not encouraging either — according to Capgemini's Digital Talent Gap report, the global average digital talent gap is 56%), we can see this problem will remain on the agenda for some time. In fact, we can say that attracting and retaining digital talent will be even harder.
3) Personalized Solutions
HR's role is of course not — and should not be — limited to supporting leaders or managers. A shout-out here to every employee who thinks digital transformation is going to take their job.
Yes, in the coming years many processes in every field and every industry will be digitized, automation will increase, and the time people spend on routine work will shrink. But in my view, this does not mean the need for people will decrease. Because we will have brand-new topics to work on. "Personalized HR solutions" is one of them. In the coming years, individually tailored solutions will come to the fore in HR. What do I mean? We will need to develop all kinds of strategies: coaching each person according to their own needs, designing separate competency sets by position or role, retaining people, helping them acquire new skills, building engagement and making sure they have a happy employee experience.
4) Different Generations and Managing Expectations
While doing all this, it is of course essential to keep different generations and their changing expectations in mind. Generation X continues in working life, while Generation Y has now become the dominant generation at work, at around 35–40% of the workforce. Generation Z has already started to join working life in earnest. Unfortunately, keeping three very different generations happy at the same time with the same HR solutions is hardly possible from here on. Over the next few years, HR's work will become far more critical than it is today. And we have not even added changing professions, new ways of working, remote and flexible models, and an office-less work culture to the equation — add those, and the picture becomes far more complex.
5) Changes in Organizational Structures
I call this "Building the Organization of the Future." With everything undergoing such intense change and transformation, you don't think we can carry on with the same organizational structures, do you?
I am aware we are not very focused on this topic right now, but I believe that in the short term — within just a few years — all the structures and org charts we have built will become flat. We will start to see much more clearly in our companies that things are becoming "more egalitarian," and that what really matters is not our titles but "the contribution we make and the value we create." In other words, it is worth keeping somewhere on our mental agenda already the models in which management and leadership change entirely, superior–subordinate relationships become increasingly blurred and eventually disappear, you are your own manager, and titles are decided by employees 😊
6) Real-Time Measurement and HR Analytics
These two trends are closely tied to "Digital HR." Since I want to cover Digital HR in much more detail in a separate article, I will not go deep here, but I do not want to move on without at least touching on what these trends will give us — both are very important.
Across every measurement and evaluation moment in HR, the trend of real-time measurement is gaining ground. What will it give us? We can say it "helps you spot what is going wrong before it becomes chronic and take action faster and in a more focused way." It will let you run more real-time HR management and give you the flexibility to change course when needed — and we all experienced in 2020 how important that is. Think about it: any measurement taken in January 2020 (on whatever topic) had already lost its meaning and validity by the end of March. This shows us that from now on we cannot carry on with measurement and evaluation practices run only once or twice a year. In short: going forward, quickly put tools that offer short-cycle measurement and evaluation on your radar.
As for HR Analytics, we can say it will let us identify the relationships and interactions between all the metrics, KPIs and HR parameters we measure in real time, track the correlations between them much more closely, and run more data-driven HR management. Thanks to artificial intelligence, data we would once have spent days working through will reach us ready for us to simply draw conclusions and take the right action. Not to mention the comfort of it 😊
7) Developing and Building Skills
By 2025:
- For every employee, 40% of all skills will change. In other words, the skills expected of us are changing.
- 50% of all employees will need reskilling. We are entering a period in which we must quickly get ready for brand-new roles and even professions.
- Meanwhile, employers aim to reskill 70% of their employees and upgrade their existing skills.
Reviewing existing competencies, questioning their validity and what they serve and how, factoring in new and digital skills, and preparing employees — especially psychologically — for these major change processes: would you count these among HR's new agendas?
8) Active Learning and Changing Learning Strategies
"Learning" is changing its identity. We now learn more on our own and online. What's more, we are more aware of what we want to learn and what we need. In other words, we are more conscious learners. In short, an active learning model "that puts the learner and their needs first" will form the backbone of learning and development strategies.
On the other hand, we are not after learning focused only on working life and what we can use there; we are looking for learning models that we will benefit from in every area of life and that also contribute to our private and social lives. So from the perspective of learning and development professionals, we have become much harder to please 😊
The numbers tell us the same thing. During the pandemic:
- the number of individuals seeking online learning opportunities on their own initiative rose 4-fold,
- employers offering online learning opportunities to their employees rose 5-fold,
- and the number of students accessing online training saw a 9-fold increase.
I believe companies will benefit greatly from revisiting their learning and development strategies and reviewing the learning experience they offer employees. You can also follow my article "2021 Learning and Development Trends" on this topic.
9) Building an Office-less Culture
I also touched on this topic in my article "2021 Workplace and Working Life Trends." There is a lot of work to do and many stories to write. On top of that, a major challenge awaits us all: bringing all of these processes to life in a remote working model.
Important milestones such as "involving employees in what is being done," "helping them find benefit and meaning," and "creating an effective corporate culture" — which are quite hard even face to face — will now have to be reached without offices, largely without being face to face with employees, while we also try to build hybrid models. I do not think it would be wrong to say "this will be the hardest part of everything we need to do."
If you have started asking yourself how ready you are to build an office-less culture, you are that much closer to the agendas HR will be working on in 2021 and beyond.
Perhaps later, in another article, we can talk about where all these important focus areas should ultimately lead. How do we channel all these resources and efforts toward "Creating a Happy Employee Experience," and how can we take the experience an employee has at every stage to a higher level? I believe these questions are very valuable too.
For the current agenda, take a look at our article on employee engagement trends for 2027.
Until the next article,
Stay healthy
