“You must work from home!”
Yeah, alright Boris, we’ll change our entire work model overnight 🙄
We were confined to our homes. We set up makeshift desks on dining tables and ironing boards. Colleagues used to collaborating in person had to grapple with Zoom and Teams – “You’re on mute!” became a daily phrase. And HR and IT departments bore the brunt of making that possible.
But we did it, didn’t we?!
It’s hard to believe that was four years ago! We haven’t quite settled on what is the ‘new normal’ as what some businesses leaders want clashes with what employees have come to expect but there’s no doubt the world of work has changed forever.
What has that meant for HR?
COVID was the biggest challenge the profession has ever faced. As we came out the other end of the pandemic one thing was clear – just how important the role of human resources is within a business.
In some organisations, HR was seen as the personnel admin department. They’re now a key player in organisational strategy, providing a voice at the leadership table for people and culture. It’s just a shame that it took a global pandemic for that shift to happen!
The old HR rulebook has, thankfully, been thrown out the window. But this means leaders have had to rethink how they support and manage their workforce in this new version of a workplace, which is still evolving, including:
- New health and safety requirements
- Furloughing staff, business restructures, potentially reducing headcount
- Reviewing and changing contracts of employment
- How to engage employees in a hybrid/remote model
- Supporting managers in a new way of working.
A rise in flexible working
Before lockdown, only 5.7% of workers reported working exclusively at home. In June 2020, this figure was 36.5%. Most workers haven’t fully returned to the office since the enforced working from home began – 83% of organisations had hybrid working in place in 2023.
The world has changed. Employees have come to expect an element of flexible working and the lack of flexibility caused about 4 million people to change careers and 2 million to leave their jobs from 2022 to 2023.
This has meant a shift in how we:
- Recruit
- Engage an increasingly dispersed workforce
- Manage performance
- Retain staff
- Support employees’ mental and physical health
- Work with IT to ensure we have the technology infrastructure to support the above.
Data-driven decision making
Love them or hate them, there’s no getting away from the fact that numbers allow us vital insight into our workforce. There has been an increase in using data and analytics as a basis for making decisions across all industries. Within human resources, one of the ways we can use data is to monitor and analyse performance and productivity to be able to forecast what we need the workforce to look like going forwards and how that will impact the bottom line.
With a dispersed workforce, it’s even more important to carefully monitor employee engagement and satisfaction. It’s much harder to gauge how happy your employees are when you can’t simply walk through the office and see them. Annual surveys and more regular pulse surveys allow you to take the temperature of your organisation and use the data to guide engagement and wider business strategies.
Growth of learning and development
Within human resources you now have an integral role in ensuring your existing employees have the necessary skills that can flex with your business as its needs change over time.
Competency mapping allows you to identify any skill gaps and look at ways to fill them internally. Upskilling your employees means that you’ll have a highly adaptive workforce that can be redeployed, if necessary, as organisational structures change – reducing the need for redundancies.
Offering learning and development opportunities to your staff helps them to stay loyal to your company for longer because they feel like they’ve been invested in. People generally like to understand their potential career path and if they can’t see how they can progress within your organisation they will move on.
Remote recruitment
Although there are businesses trying to get their employees’ bums back on seats in the office, remote working is not going away for most of us. Many organisations have moved to a remote-first model since the pandemic, and as mentioned above more than 8 in 10 organisations have hybrid working in place.
Remote – and hybrid working to an extent – allows you to recruit from a wider talent pool as distance to the office is no longer such a concern. But this has opened up more complications regarding employment contracts and remuneration. Do you need to offer a London weighting on a salary if your employee lives 100 miles away and only comes into London once a quarter? Do you pay a reduced salary and pay travel expenses?
The pandemic taught us that virtual communication is an acceptable alternative to face-to-face meetings – as long as you don’t interview with your camera turned off! Both hiring managers and candidates can save time with virtual interviews, and for remote roles, the whole process from applications to onboarding will be carried out without a single sweaty handshake. For HR, this means having to rewrite your recruitment and sourcing strategies and work on how to effectively onboard new starters without sacrificing employee experience.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
HR has been banging on about DEI in the workplace for years. For some organisations, getting the rest of the business onboard has been more challenging. The growth of flexible working can benefit those employees who might have struggled to access the workplace previously including disabled people, those with caring responsibilities and people living in marginalised communities.
The people team is responsible for creating policies that foster an inclusive culture and support people from all walks of life while working within your organisation. There are so many people who want to work. All they need is a bit of flexibility and understanding. Are you willing to give up on a super talented candidate because they need to flex their hours around caring for their sick parent?
Along with a culture shift at all levels of the business, we can aim to eliminate bias in the application process using new technologies and make our teams more diverse and representative of society as a whole.
In a post-pandemic world, the role of HR has evolved. The old, traditional, job description has been ripped up. The people function is now a strategic partner with a voice at the table, ensuring that business decisions are made with people at their heart.