From the 1980’s personal manager era to the current strategic and structural approach to people management, HR has come from very far. Today, the human resource role is dynamic, multifaceted and with lots of tentative challenges. These challenges are forcing organizations to change tact and deliver more personalized HR services. It’s no longer about HR practitioners pleasing the top half of management. It is now about strategic employee engagement that combines the wishes, needs, and capabilities of the employee with the company goals.   David Ulrich’s Human Resource Champions puts it more lucidly that for a human resource department to succeed it must be an: employee champion, administrative agent, strategic player and change agent.

More HR trends to watch out for in HR:

1. Focus on Employee Productivity

In the past, a lot of companies used to do more staff recruitment to gain increased productivity. This put the Human resource departments into a lot of pressure of filling many company positions within the shortest time possible resulting in under quality staff recruitments. Through HR today, more and more companies are hiring less and investing more in training their current group of employees, thus resulting in better productivity and reduced operational costs.  Conversely, for the Companies hiring more employees, the HR selection criteria has been switched up. The trend nowadays is the integration of people analytics into recruitment process. It works by companies using analytics of their best employees and teams to create and improve their recruitment criteria as well as for talent development.

2. Better Human Resource Experience = Better Customer Experience

Employee experience is equal to customer experience. When your staff is happy with how the company operates, then there is better probability of transcending this positive perception to customer .This statement describes why many companies are investing in improving HR services. It comes from a shared realization among companies that despite recognizing of a HR department, most employees are dissatisfied with the process of accessing HR information via their intranet.

3. Downsizing of HR Department’s

While the quality of HR service is predestined to improve, the number of HR jobs is on the decline. More investment in refined HR tools and technology is the reason for this. The high level of Automation in HR means only the most experienced HR will be sought after.

4. Old School Performance Review Systems Phase Out

For sometime now talk has been thrive on eliminating the annual performance review system as it: provides insufficient feedback on factors affecting employee performance and engagement. Touching base with employees on a weekly basis to discuss on their goals, challenges and so on is something more managers are warming up to. Managers are realizing that the latter review system offers up tune feedback as compared to the previous one.

Another new approach to employee review is the focus on team/ departmental review. This method is allowing managers to pinpoint the problem areas that individual members face when working together and draw possible solutions to them.

In Conclusion

And as the world continues to change quickly HR professionals need to be on the lookout for better opportunities to improve and upscale their staff as employees remain the biggest value addition element in business.