Description – The COVID-19 pandemic has created a major shift in HR trends across a huge range of workplaces. Adapting to new remote work scenarios, many firms have begun to embrace virtual connections, outsourcing, and new office-culture structures.
Unless you are an author or you work online already, it’s likely that your professional life has recently undergone some changes. Workplaces around the world were forced to alter their HR structures during the COVID-19 pandemic drastically. The rise in remote working and virtual offices presented new challenges for managers and allowed experts to analyze what the future of work might look like as communications technology improves.
HR trends during the pandemic (and as we move towards a post-pandemic phase) show numerous creative adaptations and adjustments across companies and workplaces. These adaptations include the adoption of new technology and more flexible working conditions. These case studies and HR trends 2021 show how the future of work might look as we approach 2022.
HR Trends Throughout 2020-21
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Working From Home
Working from home was a necessity for many people throughout the pandemic. This created an urgent need for companies to shift their HR organization into a totally remote model almost overnight. For some companies, these HR trends and challenges led to a more flexible work culture. Employees were encouraged to perform on their own and report back at virtual meetings. This has led to some companies adopting a remote workforce permanently, with online meetings and communications replacing an in-office staff.
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Data Analysis of Workforce
However, while some companies have embraced a more self-led workforce, others have made use of technology to keep tabs on their employees. For example, some companies use online analytics tools to chart employee participation, online activity, and engagement in virtual meetings. This can help companies to manage projects and motivate staff to meet deadlines, even from a distance. These HR trends for the future are useful to consider when employers think about how to build a remote yet cohesive workforce.
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Building HR Connections
As well as just ensuring that productivity continues remotely, HR teams face new challenges in terms of building connections and curating the employee journey. Without the internal structure of the office, it can be hard to integrate new members into a team or to celebrate and reward joint ventures. Many companies are embracing virtual happy hours or creating drop-in social sessions online for employees to attend. This goes a long way towards recreating a virtual office culture without stifling employees during working hours with the need to constantly appear online.
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Outsourcing
Unfortunately, HR market trends also show that large-scale redundancies have been a reality for many companies during the pandemic. Now that many workplaces are returning to their normal operations, there is a question of how teams are going to be rebuilt. Rather than rehiring complete, in-house teams, many companies are turning to outsource instead.
Recent HR outsourcing trends show an uptick in the number of freelancers hired and the number of ex-employees turning to freelance work during the pandemic. This suggests that companies are saving money by fleshing out their diminished staff with freelancers. They may also outsource projects to remote firms if there is no structure in place to support in-house teams. This, in turn, has led to increased demand for new firms offering B2B services specifically to take on outsourced work. In this case, we can see that fluctuations in HR trends and markets create new job opportunities as old roles and positions become redundant.
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Increased Automation
Automation is always a hot topic in HR trends news. Automation of basic HR management systems can save firms money and cut back on inefficiencies. By automating HR systems, companies can also ensure that work is virtually backed up and stored. This can also lead to increased client satisfaction, as it is generally easier to pull up an account on a virtual system than to hunt through manually updated records. Modern automated HR systems are also highly customizable, allowing firms to build software that’s tailored to their needs. This can improve project timings, allow for more virtual communication between teams, and improve employee experience all-around.
Conclusion
HR trends have largely been redefined by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unlikely that, in the aftermath, workplace structures will return to the way they were before. Instead, companies will adapt to create new workforce structures and build HR teams around this. This can lead to increased efficiency and create new opportunities for outsourcing and B2B collaboration.
Final Call: How has your working life been affected by the pandemic? Have you swapped to working from home? Are you putting new HR systems in place for your business? Share your experiences in the comments!
Author’s Bio: Emily Moore is an English & programming teacher with a passion for space and blogging. She believes that current exploration should be focused on preserving our planet’s resources. With satellites circling the orbit, it is easier to get relevant data on any environmental changes. This, in turn, should help people quickly address any challenges.
