6 of the latest trends in talent management that you need to know about
The latest trends in talent management have been, in part, shaped by the pandemic and how HR leaders are responding to the resulting new work models.
To help you understand what exactly this means, how to beat the competition to increasingly scarce talent, keep the talent you already have – and ensure your people are engaged and have a clear career path in your organization – we’ve prepared this short look at the six most important emerging trends in talent management.
1. The Great Resignation – or the case of the paradoxical labor market
Perhaps the most important of current trends in talent management – more people are leaving work than ever before. Although the phenomenon has largely been a focus of US commentators, the Great Resignation hasn’t spared Europe or Asia and is expected to uptick in 2022 as people in these regions work out their often much-longer notice periods.
As a result of the Great Resignation, many organizations will be experiencing an unusual paradox. People are everywhere – and job openings are everywhere – but hiring is harder than ever before.
Although the motivation for resignations subtly varies in different regions, the driving force is similar. People want more flexibility from their jobs, more opportunities for non-linear or unconventional development, and want to do jobs that interest and motivate them.
Your people are becoming much more discerning about how they value the time they give you – both in terms of compensation and additional benefits like work/life balance. Evolving the way you work – and the way you expect your people to work – will be vital in managing them and ensuring your organizational success as time goes on.
2. Employee wellbeing will continue to be a key area of focus
Although there are newer emerging trends in talent management, this favorite from the beginning of the pandemic will continue to dominate the landscape for the foreseeable future.
HR professionals are quickly coming to realize that wellbeing isn’t so much a benefit as it is an opportunity to support their people in their work and in their non-work life. And, if people feel their wellbeing is neglected, they will simply vote with their feet.
As with other trends, the rise to prominence of wellbeing is evolving to take on new complexions as we move into 2022. While initially adopted as a strategic concern to help drive performance, many organizations are beginning to build on these foundations to enhance their people’s individual and family lives, having seen the real impact that paying attention to wellbeing has had on their bottom line.
Performance management is no longer an annual event; the shift to regular check-ins and a more people centric focus is what is setting organizations apart from their competition. Managers will need to balance not just performance goals and achievements of their people but take into account their ambitions outside of the working environment, such as flexible working options, too.
3. Workforce optimization and increasing automation
These trends aren’t just accelerating to help organizations cope with a sudden labor shortage that’s expected to persist for several years. Automation is the natural trend in all advancing and growing economies as labor costs rise and workers value their time more and more.
For people-centric industries, these two trends represent a great opportunity to improve the way your organization works. Workforce optimization means ensuring your people are working on the tasks that add value to an organization, match their skillsets, and facilitate their development and career advancement. Automation means relieving fee-earners, specialists, and strategic decision-makers of the burdens of administration and operational complexity.
Both can, therefore, play a vital part in keeping your people engaged – giving them a reason to stay with you long term and helping you tackle the Great Resignation on two fronts.
4. Closing the skills gap
If skills planning isn’t on your radar yet, it needs to be.
The accelerating pace of change we’ve experienced over the past few years has seen many companies declare they either have a skills gap now or will in the next few years.
The organizations that are best positioned to deal with the reality of changing skills landscapes are those with a holistic view of their employees’ skills now - and an idea of the skills their people are interested in developing as part of their next steps.
What gave them this insight? A people-centric approach to human capital management and enterprise resource management that allows you to track your peoples’ skills data alongside their personnel and resource availability data. Providing a single source of truth for talent management that turns information traditionally considered part of the soft-side of HR into rock-solid numerical data and value-driven metrics that can easily be used to make a business case to leadership teams and stakeholders.
5. Hybrid work is driving business transformation
Although the idea of a location-agnostic workforce has been a popular one ever since laptops became widely available, it wasn’t seen as an imminent possibility until 2020.
This was partly due to business inertia – our systems, processes, and workflows were all centered on the office, as were those of our customers and partners. But it was also in part down to the fact that until very recently, organization’s natural tendency towards flexibility was to adopt an “all or nothing” attitude.
Despite being unpopular with many, the traditional blanket-no towards flexible or hybrid working was based on very real concerns. With operational complexity growing year on year, adding multiple new working styles into the mix would likely have pushed many organizations to breaking point.
But two years of imposed remote and hybrid working have changed this, forcing organizations to reorient their digital transformation projects around facilitating hybrid working.
6. Adopting the technology and tools to support changes to workplace dynamics
The adoption of new HR toolkits and technology has traditionally been reactively driven and highly contingent on bottom-line outcomes.
But full-scale transformations in how we view work are forcing HR technology to the forefront.
We’re all in a process of renegotiating the scope of our jobs. We’re having complex conversations about the questions of where work needs to happen. And all as organizations deal with the reality of increasingly global and interconnected teams that massively increase compliance and operational burdens.
In this environment, HR needs to take a much less dogmatic approach to the question of how workflows are managed, how processes are carried out, and how the all-important question of flexibility is concerned.
Technology will also accelerate employee ownership of feedback and development.
Managing talent in increasingly fluid operating environments requires a platform that provides full data visibility of your people and how their skillsets and performance contribute to project success and profitability. It must allow your teams the flexibility they need in designing and completing workflows to accommodate everyone in your organization, no matter where and how they work.
How can Unit4 help you?
Unit4 creates HCM technology specifically designed for the unique needs of people-centric organizations. Helping you to manage and develop your people, attract world-class talent, and ensure and proactively encourage engagement, learning, and development.
Together with our next-generation ERP and FP&A tools, our software can do everything from suggesting avenues for development to proactively identifying flight risks, allowing you to help your people get the most out of what you can offer them so they can, in turn, contribute effectively to your organization’s goals.
To discover more, you can check out our dedicated HCM product pages or click here to book a demo and see what our solution can do for your organization yourself.
