The 'Future of Work'​ has arrived: 12 Predictions for HR in 2021

We also learnt that the field of Human Resources is even more important than we thought it was, that people analytics can save lives and that (albeit aided by technology) humans and the organisations they work for can adapt quickly in times of crisis – witness the largest remote working experiment in history.

So, what do the events of 2020 mean for 2021? For a start, it arguably makes it even more difficult to predict. In my predictions for 2020, I quoted one of my favourite authors, Douglas Adams, who quite correctly asserts that “Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game,” before conceding that it’s a game we all have to play given that “the world is changing so fast and we need to have some sort of idea of what the future’s actually going to be like because we are going to have to live there, probably next week.” That seems like a pretty accurate epitaph for 2020.

I’ve been publishing an annual set of ‘predictions’ since 2014, and it has to be said that my track record is, to put it mildly, not one that will have Nostradamus quaking in his celestial boots. That said, I did finally (after 30 years!) successfully predict that Liverpool would win the Premier League.

In all seriousness, some of the trends (see the subtle shift from ‘predictions’ to ‘trends’?) below have appeared in various guises in my previous annual gazes into the crystal ball. Many have evolved and/or accelerated during the last tumultuous 12 months.

WHAT SHOULD TRENDS #11 and #12 BE? GET INVOLVED

Studious readers will note that the title image indicates 12 trends, whereas only ten are presented below. That is because I’m keen to crowdsource the final two trends from readers of this article. What else should I have included? Please let me know in the comments section below, and I’ll add my favourite two to an updated version of this article in the New Year.

***UPDATE – 5TH JANUARY 2021***

Wow! What a response. When I dreamt of the idea of crowdsourcing trends #11 and #12 for this article, I expected to get a handful of suggestions and certainly no more than ten. Instead, you’ve collectively tabled (at the time of writing) over 75 mostly excellent suggestions amongst more than 200 comments on the original article. I’m blown away and very grateful. Thanks to all of you who took the time to craft your ideas.

As such it’s been a very difficult job in arriving at just two, but after much deliberation I’ve decided on two outward looking trends, which I sincerely hope to see more of in 2021. First up at #11, is an increased focus on outcomes vs. activities - a combination of suggestions from Dave Ulrich, Charlotte Nagy and Willson Overend.

To round things off at #12, several of you tabled ideas about HR acting as an external change agent and influencing areas such as the environment, education and communities. Thanks to Swecha Mohapatra, M.Angeles Alba Garcia de la Camacha, Veronka Pisarieva and Olivia Constantine for your collective thoughts with this one.

More detail in the new sections for trends #11 and #12 below – and the image has now been updated.

LISTEN TO THE 2021 HR PREDICTIONS PODCAST

We decided to record a special episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast where Ian Bailie and I discuss the 2021 trends and what HR leaders and professionals should do to prepare for the future. You can listen by clicking here or on the image below.

#1 THE ‘FUTURE OF WORK’ HAS ARRIVED 

As he invariably does, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella captured perfectly one of the most significant impacts of the pandemic, when he declared that” “We have seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months.” Indeed, the crisis has arguably fast-forwarded the ‘future of work’ by five or ten years. There is no going back. The era of hybrid work is well and truly here. Now we need to make hybrid working ‘work’ and dovetail factors such as employee preferences and wellbeing with business requirements. HR and People Analytics teams will be at the forefront of this discussion as they answer questions such as: What are the tasks that can be done more productively remotely? What are the types of work we need to be together to do? How does our culture need to evolve in line with hybrid working? How can our workplaces be more collaborative? Finally, if the ‘future of work’ really has arrived, does that mean we will stop hearing about the ‘future of work’? If so, I suspect a certain Barry Flack will be delighted!

#2 ALL EYES ON HR

The pandemic has thrust the human resources function into the spotlight. The pivotal role played by the CHRO in this crisis has been likened to that of the CFO during the Global Financial Crisis. HR has thrived during this difficult time in organisations where the function is well led, has strong senior stakeholder equity, has prioritised employee wellbeing and has robust capability in people analytics. Research from the likes of the World Economic Forum (here), IBM (here, see FIG 1), Deloitte (here), Accenture (here) and Merryck & Co (here) all point the way forward for how HR should evolve to a more enhanced role. Companies need their HR functions like they’ve never needed them before – not only to be the conductor of digital transformation and new ways of working for people related issues, but to put the ‘human’ at the centre and ensure that our workplaces become fairer, better and more humane. All eyes are on HR and undoubtedly HR has a unique role to play. Can the function deliver on the weight of expectations that have been thrust onto its shoulders?

FIG 1: The evolution of Human Resources (Source: Accelerating the journey to HR 3.0, IBM Institute of Business Value)

#3 WELLBEING TAKES CENTRE STAGE

One of the major positives I’ve seen during the crisis is that the vast majority of organisations I’ve spoken to have prioritised employee health and wellbeing above everything else in their response to the pandemic. It is a start, but there is much, much more work to do. The levels of stress, burnout and mental illness in many workplaces is unacceptable and - according to research by the likes of Jeffrey Pfeffer and Leanne Williams (here) – the pandemic has only made the situation worse. Moreover, not only does this have a calamitous impact on the physical and mental health of the workforce but, as evidenced by Pfeffer in his sobering tome Dying for a Paycheck, it has a negative impact on business performance too. This is where strong leadership from HR comes in, backed up by evidence from people analytics teams. As an example, Leena Nair shared with me in an episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast that Unilever found that they get a $2.50 return for every $1.00 invested in employee wellness. I’m looking forward to learning about similar examples from other companies and am optimistic that the shift to prioritising wellbeing and mental health will continue as we hopefully emerge on the other side of the pandemic.

#4 PEOPLE ANALYTICS CONTINUES TO FLOURISH, DEEPEN & SCALE FOR VALUE

Strong capability in People Analytics is an absolute must-have for any CHRO looking to deliver positive impact for the business and its workforce. During the pandemic it is not too dramatic to state that people analytics has helped save lives – either within an organisation through a focus on employee health and wellbeing or through supporting business continuity in companies focused on essential supplies such as medicines. Our recent research at Insight222, conducted with 60 global organisations during the pandemic, finds that people analytics continues to grow, investment in analytics technology is increasing and leading people analytics teams are reorganising themselves to focus on business demand and delivering value at scale (see FIG 2 for Insight222’s recommended operating model for people analytics). People Analytics is no longer a nice-to-have but an absolute essential for any organisation.

FIG 2: The Insight222 Operating Model for People Analytics (Source: Delivering Value at Scale: A New Operating Model for People Analytics, Insight222, 2020)

#5 ETHICS + VALUE = TRUST: DON’T’ FORGET THE ‘H’ IN HR

Strong governance is a critical leading practice in people analytics. In no area is this more important than ethics – particularly now as organisations seek to juggle the ramifications of remote and hybrid working. The emergence of a number of sinisterly named employee monitoring technologies (Controlio, Teramind and StaffCop are three examples) designed to track what employees are doing (without their knowledge) are trying to capitalise on the shift to remote working. These tools provide little value and are a surefire way of destroying employee trust. This heightens the need for an Ethics Charter to mitigate risk around the use of people data and provide a fair exchange of value to employees for sharing their data. The good news here is that according to research from Accenture, 92% of employees are open to the collection of data about them providing they benefit personally. Developing an Ethics Charter was the first co-creation project we undertook with members of Insight222’s People Analytics Program. Those companies – and others that have implemented ethics charters – have flourishing people analytics teams, create value for the business and the workforce and are setting themselves up for continued success into 2021 and beyond.

#6 EX IS BIGGER THAN HR AS FOCUS SHIFTS TO HYBRID

In last year’s predictions, I commented that “Employee Experience is pretty much the biggest thing in HR.” HR professionals themselves anointed EX as the top trend changing the way talent is attracted and retained in LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2020 – and this was before the crisis. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that "Employee Experience is bigger than HR" given that research by TI People finds that of the 36 most important employee touchpoints, only one is owned by HR (see FIG 3). This means that to manage EX effectively, HR has to engage and involve line managers and work in concert with functions such as IT, Facilities and other functional areas. This requirement to work across the business to drive EX has become even more apparent in the crisis. Most organisations I speak with are reimagining future ways of working and workplace design post-pandemic with employee preferences at the centre. Employees want consumer-grade experiences at work that are meaningful, deeply personalised and digital. You can’t measure, personalise and improve the employee experience without people analytics, and our research at Insight222 finds that employee experience ranks second (behind business and strategy) as the area where people analytics is adding most value in 60 global companies. The focus of EX may have shifted towards hybrid work, but it will continue to lead the HR - and business agendas as we head into 2021.

FIG 3: The line manager is the key touchpoint owner for Employee Experience (Source: TI People, The State of Employee Experience)

#7 LEARNING: ON DEMAND, PERSONALISED, VIRTUAL AND MULTI-FORMAT

To most business leaders, building employee skills is the best way to close skills gaps within their companies. When you factor in the findings of a 2019 study by IBM, which found that the time it takes to close a skills gap through training has increased from an average of three days in 2014 to 36 days in 2018, it’s easy to see why continuous learning and skills development features at the top of organisational priorities. The digital transformation of learning underpinned by on demand, personalised, virtual, multi-format platforms like Degreed, EdCast, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera and of course our very own myHRfuture will accelerate in 2021 as HR finally consigns the ‘one size fits all’ programs of the past to the waste bin of history. Increasingly, learning will come together with skills and careers (see trend #8) as traditional siloes in HR are broken down to the benefit of the business, the workforce and HR professionals themselves. For more on the exciting shift in learning, have a listen to recent episodes of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast where I speak with Diane Gherson (IBM), Simon Brown (Novartis) and Vidya Krishnan (Ericsson).

#8 SKILLS, LEARNING AND CAREERS COME TOGETHER – THE RISE OF THE ‘TALENT MARKETPLACE’

In last year’s set of predictions, I suggested that ‘skills are the new currency’ in the workplace, as companies increasingly seek to infer and create value from employee skills data. Companies like IBM, Unilever, Novartis and Schneider Electric are building cultures where skills are of central importance. To achieve this, they have brought hitherto siloed HR programs such as learning, career and internal mobility together with skills and technology that enables personalisation to create a thriving marketplace for talent. With the pandemic increasing the focus even more on internal mobility, the rise of the ‘talent marketplace’ will gather pace in 2021. I know of several large global companies who are either developing these marketplaces themselves or working with tech firms such as Gloat and Degreed to do so. The shift to focusing on skills is changing Strategic Workforce Planning. In research we’ve conducted at Insight222 with 34 global companies on the current and future state of SWP, nearly all companies surveyed (90%) expressed a desire to build a skills-based SWP process. However, only a quarter of companies (26%) are actively doing so. Expect this to change in 2021.

#9 EMPATHETIC LEADERSHIP, INCLUSIVE CULTURES

The pandemic provided a stark reminder that leaders that are vulnerable, empathetic, data-driven, honest, collaborative and prepared to listen leave citizens and employees better off, as well as helping foster healthier and more inclusive cultures. HR has a pivotal role to play in how leaders are identified, developed, rewarded and held accountable for their behaviour. Moreover, HR should play a crucial part in helping leaders create transparent, inclusive, diverse and psychologically safe workplaces built on trust, equity and a sense of belonging. Using listening tools, such as how Microsoft does with Daily Pulse, provides the basis for HR to act as the conduit to creating a continuous and open dialogue between leaders and the workforce, which not only helps shape a healthy culture but ultimately helps drive organisational performance too.

#10 TO DELIVER, HR HAS TO BECOME DIGITAL, AGILE AND DATA SAVVY

It seems clear that not only is HR one of the most exciting areas of business to work in, it is also one of the most important. As the function rapidly reinvents itself to meet the lofty expectations of leaders and the workforce, so HR professionals themselves need to reskill. Put simply, HR must become more digital, more agile and more data literate to deliver greater business value. The good news is research we’ve conducted on the HR Skills of the Future demonstrates that HR professionals recognise this (FIG 4 highlights the six skills HR professionals most want to learn, and FIG 5 highlights a learning pathway to become a data-driven HR Business Partner). Companies and CHROs must therefore provide the wherewithal, support and investment for this reskilling evolution of HR to happen. 

FIG 4 and 5 - Source: myHRfuture

#11 INCREASED FOCUS ON OUTCOMES VS. ACTIVITIES

Thanks to Dave Ulrich, Charlotte Nagy and Willson Overend for this first of two crowdsourced trends. Of all the initiatives HR could invest in, which ones will have the greatest impact on business outcomes in their own organisation? This was one of the questions Dave Ulrich posed (see below). His answer is a shift from description to prescription whereby HR provides guidance on where best to invest the approximately 1% of revenue they will spend in 2021 on HR related initiatives. As Charlotte commented: “It doesn’t matter how many HR programs or tech solutions are implemented if desired outcomes are not achieved.” Thank you, Dave, Charlotte and Willson.

#12 HR AS EXTERNAL CHANGE AGENT

As HR continues to grow its influence, why should it restrict its work to the internal organisation? What about trying to positively change things in the wider world? Several people suggested this in the second crowdsourced trend for 2021. M.Angeles Alba Garcia de la Camacha asked how HR can impact climate change whilst Swechha Mohapatra suggested that HR will play a greater role in supporting Environmental, Social and Governance priorities. Veronika Pisarieva advocated HR playing an active role in policy making such as how tax can be an obstacle to working ‘from wherever’. Along a similar line, Olivia Constantine called for HR to influence national policy on education. Some terrific and imaginative thoughts.

THANK YOU