The last couple of years have brought about diverse changes in the HR industry. In fact, the increased push of diversity in organizations, the global pandemic, and working from home have changed the operations of HR. The pandemic has changed the way we work; while 2021 was a year of reinventing HR and solidifying its new role, 2022 is going to be all about pushing the boundaries of how HR can add value. 

Going forward, HR can take a pivotal role in building the organizations of the future, thanks to all the learnings from the pandemic era. 

Developing and Retaining Talent 

Developing and retaining talent continues to be the biggest priority for HR in 2022. The pandemic has taught us that the capability to go digital is crucial. Skill development is a critical part of any business model now since markets, strategies, and even dynamic business environments have been rapidly evolving. Especially for IT companies, it has become important to refresh and strengthen the talent of the technology teams through continuous training and development. Moreover, remote working has opened up a lot of new opportunities.

Most future jobs and roles will be designed to be either completely remote, or allow significant flexible and remote work.  

It will likely be easier to hire and retain a diverse workforce, with the flexibility of remote working. It will help expand the talent pool of available candidates, which will then make it easier to hire good quality employees and leaders as well.

So, attracting, and retaining such diverse and geographically distributed talent will be the new challenge. Innovative KPI-based productivity and performance tracking, with a focus on long-term goals and development, and a positive mindset, can be a way to retain your employees and make future leaders out of them. 

Curating an Environment to Work In 

The beginning of the pandemic saw employees being quite enthusiastic about working from home, but as it dragged into 2021, and now into 2022, that emotion has transformed. Psychologically, it wore most people out, and employee resilience and optimism plummeted.

The HR 2022 Outlook from EngageRocket talks about several emerging trends in Human Resources and Employee Experience in 2022, and one of them is the need to focus more on keeping up the resilience, optimism, and motivation of their employees, much more than they probably did before. Throughout the pandemic, we've seen those organizations that remained supportive, and focused on keeping up employee morale and motivation, really shined. Mental health issues have become a big focus now, and talking about them with employees and encouraging workers to seek help has become critical, and this should now become critical KRAs for HR.

Developing employees through Leadership Psychology 

Organizations are realizing that there needs to be a lot of research done on human behavior and thinking, which they have not tapped into, or utilized fully, in their development of leaders and employees. Many future-oriented organizations have now made these leadership psychology training and development programs mainstream. This includes learning about our brain, and how we think, judge and make decisions. Nothing could be more important for leaders and managers, and especially human resources departments, than to learn and understand human behavior. 

Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives 

According to a Glassdoor survey, 3 out of 4 job seekers and employees look for an inclusive workplace when evaluating companies and job offers. This being said, the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion is something HR teams are increasingly realizing. 

Even before the pandemic, the research was quite clear that diversity and inclusion, especially in senior management, could provide actual business benefits, like improved productivity, profitability and stability.

Organizations need to capitalize on this opportunity by attracting, developing and retaining good and diverse talent. They can do this by enabling the required flexibility for each category and skill, and by providing an engaging, challenging and motivating in-person and virtual environment, for employees, managers and leaders. 

Whether it is through facilitating a better career experience, building a supportive workplace focused on development and retention, developing employees through leadership psychology, or delivering inclusive and purpose-driven organizations, HR will be part of the solution and will remain at the forefront of all-important business challenges in 2022.