Inspirations for your 2023 HR Roadmap

As we have entered the year 2023, let’s reflect on the latest HR trends with the potential to shape the business.

Quiet hiring goes hand in hand with up-skilling and re-skilling

One of the biggest conversations happening in HR right now? Building teams agile enough to adapt to ever-evolving business needs. McKinsey study  found that 87% of organizations already face skills gaps or are about to expect such within a few years.

A new workplace trend on the horizon, called „quiet hiring”, may be the answer. What does it mean in practice? An organizational strategy focusing on internal mobility and looking at the talent across the company. It creates an opportunity for the employee to take on a new role or move to a different focus area.

Up-skilling and re-skilling come into play. While the first one focuses on training your employees to help them advance in their current area of expertise, the latter enables them to acquire a new set of skills that could be transferable to a new career path within the company. This allows the business to retain the knowledge while redeploying it in a different capacity. Such an approach makes it possible for the company to be more agile and adapt to changing business landscapes.

Moreover, LinkedIn data¹ shows the companies that excel at internal mobility retain talent for nearly twice as long as organizations that struggle with it. Providing your team with opportunities to learn and develop new skills not only shows that you value them but also can enhance employee experience and engagement. It aims to incorporate a growth mindset into the organization, promoting the idea that we have the capacity to learn and improve.

Training the team to be future-ready

As a part of their pilot program „I Can Do IT”, BNP Paribas encouraged employees that are over 50 years old to participate in a re-skilling training in the area of software quality assurance. The project aimed to demystify the IT industry has piqued the interest of 140 people, even though the pilot edition was initially addressed to a team of 25.

Orange anticipates that by 2025, 50% of roles will evolve significantly and 100% of their employees will need at least basic digital competencies e.g., data analysis or cybersecurity. The company’s focus is on big data, automation, virtualization, cloud and new technologies.2

Investing in such projects is not only supporting the team’s growth but is also nourishing the adjustment to change, a soft skill so crucial to navigate the evolving market.

HR Trends – Embracing the technology

The market changes and technology reshapes job roles and automate tasks. According to the World Economic Forum, over one billion people will need to be reskilled by 2030 due to disruptions of the technologies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. More than half of the jobs will require an understanding of digital technology.

Metaverse Planner? Algorithm Bias Auditor? Augmented-reality journey builder?³ Organizations may need to hire people with the ability to develop skills that do not yet even exist.

Tech companies, such as Meta, Microsoft, Google and Apple have been investing heavily in metaverse technology and virtual reality, with a focus on collaboration at work. Meta’s Horizon Workrooms and Microsoft’s Mesh utilize VR technology to enable scattered teams to work in the same virtual room, no matter the physical location.⁴ How will the metaverse affect HR? An onboarding tour around the virtual office for new team members, brainstorming sessions across a virtual whiteboard, coffee chat between avatars – sounds like a very distant future?

Make Real already creates learning experiences with the use of VR technology. They worked in collaboration with Vodafone to develop a VR application that allowed learners to take on the role of a field engineer. In the experience, you need to select the correct safety equipment and perform a crucial hazard assessment before climbing a rooftop mast, above a cityscape. Incredible?

The use of digital tools and AI to automate mundane elements of work, analyze data and embrace its possibilities to create value will be increasingly in demand. Even now, in 2023, with the launch of Open AI’s Chat GPT creating prompts has become a useful tool in the HR industry – who would have thought? A multitasking HR assistant can help with crafting job descriptions, creating personalized outreaches, supporting target mapping, or improving the interview process (you can learn more from our article here: A game changer of research).

A focus on flexibility

While digitalization is progressing and in 2030, we may be working in augmented reality, right now we are exploring the boundaries of work. More companies decide to give their teams the space and autonomy to discover when and where to get the job done. Redefining remote work strategies, embracing distributed teams and testing 4 days working week – all these have one thing in common: flexibility.

The way we work has been evolving in the post-pandemic reality, drifting away from an office-centric culture. Now, once the location flexibility has been adopted by so many organizations, a new concept emerges more often – schedule flexibility.

Enter, the asynchronous work. While in a synchronous work model, the team needs to be online during the same hours, the new approach allows one colleague to start their day at 7 am while another may not open their computer until noon. Many companies that opt for this solution (Toggl, Doist, GitLab) have teams distributed across geography and time zones. Asynchronous communication makes it possible for everyone to participate in collaboration and decision-making, even with an 8-hour time difference between colleagues.

This approach also aims to respect everyone’s peak hours of focus and productivity, empowering ownership and autonomy. With so much emphasis on work-life balance and personal well-being nowadays, this model allows employees to work out, go to an appointment or spend time with family, organizing the day’s work around their personal schedule. The key to asynchronous work is creating processes that allow employees to work autonomously, setting high communication standards, relying on written down procedures, team guidelines and meticulous documentation – all in a central location accessible to everyone.

It is crucial to determine which model will drive the best results for the business. While the tech company Doist, has been async- and remote-first since day one in 2010, they still use synchronous communication strategically. It provides best outcomes in complex conversations (problem-solving, critical feedback), emergency situations such as server issues, 1:1 meetings, or culture building and team bonding. The key is to experiment with work and find a unique solution that works for your company.

Building organizational culture through employee well-being

As we have entered yet another challenging year, physical, mental and emotional health continues to be a major focus. Employee well-being will be merged into various aspects of corporate culture: from HR policies to mission statements. Companies are creating supportive work environments on many levels: mental (building understanding around mental struggles, introducing work-life balance standards), physical (promoting physical activity and healthy habits) and emotional (supporting self-care). Corporate physiotherapist, yoga classes to kick off the day, budget to be spent on health check-ups, access to self-help platforms, webinars on managing money? These are just some of the examples of how companies are integrating well-being trends into their strategies. Such initiatives not only create a healthier work environment but can also increase engagement and satisfaction which directly translates into productivity and higher retention.

While in 2023 technology is at the forefront, a human-centric approach is stronger than ever. The focus is on creating an agile team, able to quickly adapt to constantly evolving business landscapes, through flexibility, employee well-being and leveraging technology to create the best possible experiences.

As you reflect on your 2023 HR playbook, which latest HR trends are you embracing?

Author: Olga Kamińska