2020 was a rough year. The outbreak of COVID-19 meant lockdowns, which resulted in a rise of unemployment from 4% to 15% in the United States. Luckily, the number of 15% quickly decreased to 7%. Even though economic growth is expected for 2021, we can see some big trends that will have major impact on businesses worldwide. This article shows you 5 major HR trends and how your organization can anticipate them.
Automatization
There is one thing that happens during every major economic crisis. Ongoing trends accelerate. One of those trends is automatization. The use of robots and other forms of automatization can improve the efficiency of an organization. Think about the self order kiosks at McDonald’s or the usage of an ERP if you are working on a computer. Before the lockdown, a lot of organizations were not allowing their employees to work from home due to the missing ERP support that is needed for remote working. We can see that those organizations quickly adapted by using Microsoft Teams and other remote working software. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella even said that the lockdown caused two years’ worth of digital innovation to happen within two months. Rather than being afraid of new developments, embrace it and see how you and your organization can adapt to be successful in the future too.
Keep up the team spirit
When you go from working five days a week in the same room to not seeing each other for almost a year (depending where you live), it can be hard to keep up the motivation and team spirit. As we progress into 2021, this will be an ongoing challenge for HR departments all around the world. Even if a working vaccine becomes available soon, it is expected that remote working will be much more acceptable than before the COVID-19 outbreak. This will have major impacts on office buildings around the world. Especially those located in high cost of living areas. More employees working from home means more challenges for HR departments. You can keep up the motivation with catchup calls, online team events and turning on the camera in calls.
Candidate Experience
The Candidate Experience is not a completely new trend within Human Resources. We expect that 2021 will be the year that Candidate Experience will take off. With the Candidate Experience, we mean the perception of a job seeker about an employer, based on the recruitment process he/she has been a part of. We all know that the first impression is important. That is why the branding of your organization starts with the recruitment process. Just as you want to persuade your customers with your strong brand, you also want to use this to attract the best talent for your organization. By cultivating the right culture, people want to work for your organization. A popular platform for Candidate Management is Phenom TXM. Creating a career site can help your organization to stand out from the crowd.
Once a new employee is hired, it is important to arrange a good onboarding. Good onboarding will promote better company culture, increased productivity, improve talent acquisition, and increase retention rates. Additionally, a good onboarding experience will also lead to a shorter learning curve and helps employee development in many ways. Try out FourVision’s Boarding solution for Dynamics 365 HR. This solution not only works for onboarding, but also for cross-boarding and offboarding.
Employee Wellness
Employee Wellness is also one of those trends that has been around for decades, but still hasn’t reached its full potential yet. Due to extra attention from COVID-19, we expect Employee Wellness to be a major HR topic in 2021. We all know that healthy employees are happier and save employers huge amounts of health care costs. An experiment at Johnson & Johnson showed that a program to decrease the amount of smokers, saved the company $250 million over the past decade. The return on investment was $2.71 for every dollar spent on the employee wellness program.
Next to quitting smoking, there are other ways to improve they health of your employees. Additionally, you can also improve the wellness of your employees by offering gym memberships, company bicycles, or healthy food. Some organizations even offer meditation and yoga rooms.
Cultural transformation
Did you know that culture is the strongest predictor of whether a digital transformation will succeed? Moreover, we all know that the mission and vision form the essence of the brand positioning of an organization. Your company culture also depends on these principles. If you want to change your organization, you have to start within. This is where internal communications and HR are getting involved. With major business transitions happening during and post COVID-19, we expect the trend of cultural transformations to play a major role in the upcoming year.
We can help you out
At FourVision, we want to improve the life of workforces around the world. With the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources and our own Web Apps that enhance this solution, we structure, relieve, and streamline your HR department. Feel free to reach out to us by filling in a contact form below. You can also send us a message via our live chat on the bottom right of your screen!
