HR trends: Managing Employees

HR trends: Managing Employees by Career Angels

HR trends: Managing Employees

About the series: CV-19 has accelerated many trends, including (or especially!) those related to HR and recruitment. Companies that want to hire valuable candidates – who don’t quit after 3 months – have to make sure they keep up with the newest trends. What’s even more important: the need to implement new strategies in the right way.

Trends that are introduced too fast and/or by the wrong department will backfire by e.g. generating additional costs, negative employer branding, losing valuable candidates, longer recruitment processes, low(er) candidate experience, etc.

To help companies avoid these mistakes, we put together a summary of the most important trends along an employee’s life cycle – with their accompanying threats and – where possible – adding relatively simple quick wins – everything backed by stats and real cases.

This week, we are sharing trends and threats related to Phase #4 out of 5: Managing Employees.

Trend #1: Remote management & leadership

As we said in the previous article of the “HR trends” series: the “new reality” of work environment in times of CV-19 can be described with one word: virtual.

(Almost) all activities have been moved online – and that includes working, managing and leading remotely.

What are the potential threats?

  1.  Lack of competences and Best Practices among managers, which can lead to:
    ◦ expecting employees to be available at random hours that have not been agreed before
    ◦ unclear monthly settlements
    ◦ no motivational system
    ◦ forgetting to share feedback with those who “we don’t see”
    ◦ neglecting and ignoring remote employees during e.g. company events or group mailings
    ◦ leaving remote employees on their own
  2. Lack of fluent handling of hardware and software solutions and no education in the area of IT security, which can lead to leaving computers unlocked, in unsafe places, connecting to public networks, etc.

Solution?

→ There is, unfortunately, no quick fix for that. The solution: educate, educate, educate! Educate your leaders, managers, and employees.

Trend #2: Remote work

Working from home turned out to be a perfect solution for many employees around the world. According to McKinsey, 52% of workers would prefer a more flexible working model after the pandemic ends. Additionally, 30% of employees would consider changing their employer if their organization returned to full on-site work.

What are the potential threats and solutions?

Too rigorous monitoring of employees via IT tools or micro-management which is a serious threat for employees who need more freedom and rebel if somebody controls them too much.

Solution: develop new legal regulations or internal procedures that clearly define the level of control for remote workers.

Trend #3: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I)

80% of people surveyed for RESPECT Index research declare that the organization’s approach to diversity is one of the most important factors when it comes to choosing a new employer.

Other data delivered by Builtin says:

  • 4.8% of Fortune 500 CEOs are female as of March 2019 (2.4% in 2008). To put this into perspective: that’s barely more than the 4.1% of Fortune 500 CEOs who are named David and less than the 5.3% named John.
  • 16 billion USD is lost each year due to unfair treatment of employees and personnel turnover.

What are the potential threats?

Improper implementation of DE&I strategy, without proper preparation of teams and managers, which can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings and, as a result, to lower performance.

Solution?

Educate, educate, educate. (Btw, we are happy to help with that! :))

Trend #4: Up-skilling / Re-skilling

According to the research conducted by Gartner, 95% of HR leaders invest in improving their employees digital skills. Moreover, 19% of skills that are useful now, will be completely useless in the next few years.

As World Economic Forum states, we will need to requalify 1 billion employees before 2030 – and the WEF called the need to reskill / upskill our employees alarming. 50% of employees will need reskilling by 2025, as adoption of technology increases.

What are the potential threats?

The reskilling / upskilling process might be moving forward too slowly, leaving many employees not fitting to the current and upcoming job market requirements and needs.

Solution?

→ Instead of “training extensively”, select the most relevant skills to train and/or develop.

Teach others how to learn and lead by example. Show that everyone learns and introduce a “learning culture”.

Coming up next: “HR trends: Separating

Here are the other articles from the series:

If you’d like to discuss how we could potentially support your organization, feel free to get in touch by email with Zadrozna.Anna@CareerAngels.eu.