The talent landscape has become increasingly competitive and even as employees have more choices, they will feel exhausted as they return to the workplace. At the same time, companies face the need to control costs.
Management consultancy and research house Gartner has identified nine trends to be tackled to set the workforce and talent goals of organizations this year.
Trend 1: Quiet hiring as a new mode to attract talent
“Quiet quitting” a phenomenon, where employees manifest their disengagement at the workplace by declining to go “above and beyond” their basic role, became viral last year. Companies facing it retain people but lose skills and capabilities. However, they can leverage it with an anti-thesis – “quiet hiring”.
Quiet hiring is a process where an organisation move an employee from one department to another to meet the hiring needs. This trend is seen as an answer to Quiet Quitting. This can be done via internal talent mobility to ensure employees address the priorities that matter most, besides stretching and upskilling opportunities for existing employees while meeting evolving organizational needs.
Also read: Multiple Job offers to Wane, Cash Conservation: Simplilearn’s Archana Krishna Predicts 2023 Trends
Trend 2: Hybrid flexibility on the shop/factory floor
Organisations have by now come to realise that they are now in a permanent hybrid work era for employees who are not necessarily required on the shop floor or at the factory. But the other category of workers who actually do need to be physically present also needs parity with flexibility in the workplace.
This could be in the form of control over their work schedule, paid leaves, stability in their work schedule and flexibility on what they work on, who they work with and the amount they work.
Trend 3: Managers need support
The dynamic nature of the workplace and the ‘ask’ from managers in the context of the new generation of more demanding employees have put them under pressure both from their superiors and subordinates. First- and second-degree line managers are the primary connection for junior employees with the organisation’s culture.
People management is a skill one learns over time, but organisations need to back their managers by providing fresh support and training to take care of the managerial skills gap. At the same time, employers need to clarify manager priorities, tell managers how they should juggle their time and redesign their roles if required.
Trend 4: Pursuit of non-traditional candidates
In a conventional world, organisations tend to create a talent pool with a specific skill set in mind and hunt for people in that pool even though they have been strategizing plans to look for new sources of talent beyond the low-hanging fruit. With over half of the people charting non-linear career paths, applying for jobs outside their existing area of expertise, organisations need to expedite the plans to look outside the box.
This would involve fishing for talent through non-traditional sourcing methods and candidate pools without the legacy nature of job requirements asks such as industry experience and technical skills. Organisations will have to imbibe assessments that would evaluate candidates on their ability to get the work done.
Trend 5: Healing pandemic trauma
The socio-economic and political flux of the current era has put employees through a big strain mentally. This affects productivity and performance, besides translating into behavioural outbursts, quitting without a red flag and other issues. So, it is not surprising that the majority of employees now want their organisations to look at them as persons and not just as employees. Companies would need to provide requisite help and rest to take care of emotional resilience and performance, instead of doing it when a person is at the knife’s edge. This could be a mix of paid time off ahead of high-demand working periods, no-meeting weekend kickers on Fridays, wellness time and trauma counsellors on-site.
Trend 6: Push DEI, but not down the throat
Organisations are yet to get buy-in on the idea of bolstering diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI efforts with a section of employees clearly against such moves as they feel they are divisive and alienate them. Employee pushback tends to invalidate, disrupt or disconnect them from such programs. Business organisations would need to look beyond ignorance of such pushbacks or resistance as it may eventually result in attrition. Firms would need to address the resistance at an early stage.
Organisations have by now come to realise that they are now in a permanent hybrid work era for employees who are not necessarily required on the shop floor or at the factory. But the other category of workers who actually do need to be physically present also needs parity with flexibility in the workplace.
Trend 7: Getting personal, but not too close
Today, many organisations are using new-age technologies such as AI assistants and wearables to collect data on their employees’ health, living conditions and even sleep patterns to respond more effectively to their requirements. But this has a flip side with privacy concerns as technology is moving faster than what managers and business leaders can control and match up to.
Employers would need to prioritize transparency around how they collect, use and store employee data, as well as allow employees to opt out of practices they are not comfortable with. They can do this with an employee data bill of rights.
Also read: Can AI Transform Mental Health Support at Workplaces? We Find Out!
Trend 8: Algorithmic bias concerns and recruitment tech
Government regulations on privacy are a dynamic process and organisations depending on AI and machine learning in their hiring processes — as well as their vendors who rely on them — will face pressure to move a step ahead. Organisations need to be more transparent about how they are using AI, publicize their data audit and provide employees and candidates with the choice to opt-out. This is important as the ethical implications of these practices for fairness, diversity, inclusion and data privacy takes centre stage.
Trend 9: Gen Z skills gaps and erosion of social skills
The pandemic affected the young workforce disproportionately hard as social isolation made it harder for them to pursue their educational or career goals and one in two feel their education has not prepared them to enter the workforce. Gen Z lacks soft skills, such as negotiation, networking, and public speaking and the social stamina and attentiveness to work long hours, in an offline work environment. That said, the social skills of even other more mature employees were affected over the last two and a half years. Organisations will need to redefine professionalism for their entire workforce to address this challenge as the world opens up further to a hybrid workplace.
Also read: It’s Time to Make Your Mission and Vision Statement GenZ Friendly – Here’s How
End note
Organisations have their task cut out as they face multi-variate challenges with a competitive talent landscape, an exhausted workforce and the need to control costs. In the coming year, executives must get savvy to snag in-demand talent, focus on employee mental health and incorporate data ethics in a new HR operating framework to differentiate themselves as employers of choice.
