Hoverboards and teleportation – what does the future of HR actually look like?
No industry can afford to stand still, and the same can be said for human resources. In such a highly competitive industry, failure to evolve can be costly not only to yourself but also to your business.
As 2015 draws to a close, many businesses enter a period of reflection, before examining the ways they can do better the following year. We’ve all got our own ideas as to what the future holds; flying cars, hover boards, and even teleportation machines, but what does the future hold for HR? In this blog post we look at what future trends might be coming to a HR office near you.
Charged up employees
In the future, more and more organisations will opt to put their employees in charge of key HR functions. From managing their own personal records, to ensuring, should they require one, their working visas and relevant documentation remains up-to-date, even seeing employees placed in charge of their own holiday request forms.
The obvious benefit here is HR Managers suddenly become more productive, gone are the sleepless nights trying to ensure everyone is accommodated with their holiday requests; and those days spent manually checking Right to Work documentation is still valid, becomes a distant memory. Just imagine how many more hours you could add to your day?
In truth, you don’t have to imagine too hard. Equator HR already features the Employee Portal, allowing your employees to take charge of their personal records and holiday request forms, saving you valuable time to dedicate to other HR tasks. Find out more about the Equator HR Employee Portal, here.
Gamification
It’s already making waves in the recruitment industry, offering many organisation a competitive advantage as they continue to wage the war on finding talent, and being used to offer candidates real life simulations of working within a business, before they’ve even started. And now gamification is starting to make waves in the world of HR, by providing candidates insight into company culture and brand. What’s more it allows hiring managers to gain valuable metrics on candidates they may have not gathered using traditional recruitment methods.
But what about its place in the employee’s ongoing lifecycle? Gamification will play an integral part in the HR office of the future, finding its way into each and every stage of an employee’s lifecycle within a company. From training and development, which will seamlessly combine real-life scenarios, with the safety of a simulated environment, to 360 employee appraisals, gamification, while still being in relative infancy, already looks set to take HR by storm!
Managing a remote workforce becomes the norm.
This year saw the law on flexible working changes. Now all UK employees have the legal right to request flexible working, not just parents and carers. While employers are not legally obliged to accommodate such requests, the introduction of this law will undoubtedly see the number of remote and flexible workers continue to rise over time.
What will this mean for HR Managers? How can they effectively support and guide staff who aren’t based on site, and what will it mean for a number of HR policies that suddenly pose a number of questions? For example, where does the company policy stand on data security outside of the office?
HR Managers need to start putting processes in place now to ensure that as remote and flexible working becomes more popular, as is currently proving to be the case for many European countries, they are not left unprepared, or worse, employees are not left at risk of operating outside of HR legislation.
Outsourcing will continue to gain in popularity
As HR legislation and regulations continue to tighten, more and more businesses will embark on outsourcing various HR functions to experts with specialist knowledge to help ensure they remain compliant. The shift to outsourcing will also see HR departments using more effective technology specifically developed for the HR market.
This in turn will see a reduction to a number of administration- heavy HR tasks, freeing up HR managers time to focus on strategic thinking that will drive their business forward. Find out how the comprehensive outsourced payroll administration service offered by Greenpay Payroll has enjoyed significant growth over the last 12 years thanks to our Equator HR solution.
The above are of course, only our predictions, but given the current HR landscape and the increasing reliance on technology, we can be sure that whatever the future holds for HR; HR managers must begin to embrace this change sooner rather than later, as we are continuing to do with updates to the Equator HR platform – because those who don’t will surely get left behind.
