We’ve seen a significant and, let’s face it, long overdue shift, as companies realign their thinking and strategy based on their most important asset – their employees. As companies adjust to the new normal, there’s now greater responsibility and accountability placed on HR leaders. While HR leaders are still responsible for overall performance and productivity, their biggest job is to understand the challenges their human assets face.
This article explores the impact of COVID-19 on Human Resources and offers insights on strategies that are critical to follow in 2022 and beyond.
Employee experience is a key priority
Understandably, the pandemic has created high levels of stress among employees, forcing HR leaders to look at new ways to monitor their employees’ physical and mental health. One solution is to focus on enhancing the Employee Experience (EX) and creating a hyper-personalised journey in the workplace.
The EX is the employees’ perception of the organisation throughout their work lifecycle and explores their values, environment, and interactions. This approach provides leaders insights to enable them to develop tailored, motivating experiences – consequently improving their overall health and success, while boosting employee engagement.
Other benefits of delivering a hyper-personal and solid EX include improving:
- staff retention
- job satisfaction
- employer branding
- loyalty
- productivity
And as a bonus – a healthy EX leads to better customer experience which helps strengthen the overall team and company performance.
Employees are yearning for more transparency and flexibility around their career
Imagine if you could help boost engagement, increase retention, and reduce your recruitment costs. By focusing on internal talent mobility and exploring new ways to give your employees career growth opportunities, you’ll ensure your humans remain happy and productive in their roles.
With attrition rates so high (and expected to rise in 2022), HR leaders need to find new methods to retain employees for the long term. Through the implementation of internal talent mobility, current employees are given the opportunity to move into different positions within the company.
The end result? You’ll build greater business agility, improve your retention rate, and retain top talent. By giving internal employees the opportunity to move up or reskill, you’ll be fostering a more diverse and inclusive workplace.
Delivering on promise when it comes to culture
It’s no secret that satisfied and fulfilled workers are likely to be the most productive. So it’s essential that leadership teams put their attention into offering a culture of a mutually beneficial and thriving workplace.
You can create a positive impact on organisational culture by:
Encouraging accountability and transparency
Engaged employees thrive in environments where they feel they can speak out and be heard. Promote transparency and open communication by allowing people to take responsibility for their actions without blame. This helps build trust with your workers.
Setting a collaborative work environment
Great leaders who facilitate strong relationships and ensure easy collaboration among teams will see an increase in effective communication.
Cultivating a values-driven culture
Great leaders who facilitate strong relationships and ensure easy collaboration among teams will see an increase in effective communication.
Essentially, effective leaders recognise the need to prioritise the ‘people-first’ approach. This ensures a successful workplace culture where people feel they belong, empowered, and engaged.
A deeper look into HR & people analytics
HR and people analytics is becoming an increasingly essential part of HR strategy. Gathering, analysing, and leveraging data from your company’s employees means you can gain a deeper insight in order to make strategic, smarter decisions, and predictions about the workforce.
This data-driven approach can help HR and business leaders:
- identify the ‘why’ behind their numbers
- develop actionable solutions
- utilise staff in a more productive way
At Humanico, we can help you uncover ways to collect this data about your employees to improve performance and retention. Our platform allows us to leverage data insights to uncover gaps, trends, and patterns for staff – as well as find their purpose – then match them with roles that play to their strengths and passion.
In summary
HR trends indicate that business leaders will have to rethink their strategies in 2022 and beyond in order to cope with pandemic-related workforce changes.
Leaders have now shifted their focus to achieving higher-value objectives, such as ensuring their employees’ physical and mental health is a key priority, and creating a winning company culture that will lower attrition rates, retain candidates, and allow employees to thrive. Furthermore, implementing internal talent mobility allows for improved business outcomes and maximises your employees’ potential.
Interested to learn more about your people analytics through Humanico’s HR technology?
