REINVENTING HR

The new decade promises us not to be boring, some futurologists say that technologies are developing so rapidly that soon we will not have to work at all, we will have a lot of free time that we can invest in what brings us joy. Others, on the contrary, portend global unemployment due to the same technologies. So, what will actually bring us the new changed world, let's dive into it and discuss.

Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life, but it may be so, work your whole life without stopping, and soon you will become unemployed. Well, this looks more like reality, because of the high speed with which the world is changing now, many years of work experience and professional education with an excellent degree no longer give a specialist a guarantee that it will always remain in demand. Nowadays, the regularity of improving one's qualifications plays a more important role. If a specialist who received a vocational education this year neglects the possibility of obtaining fresh knowledge, then in 2025 it will be a professional unsuitable, because the "life" period of skills is from 2 to 5.5 years, and every year this indicator decreases.

Technologies are improving, the importance is increasing

As for HR, nothing will prevent the owners of this competence from staying afloat. Despite the technological progress and the maximum automation of operational processes, such as the search for candidates and the adaptation of employees, HR will not have less work, since all these processes will have to be managed by someone. Now more than ever, it will be important for HR to have analytical skills, this includes evaluating the received metric from automated systems and applying the obtained data. A great relief for the HR specialist will be provided by the advent of a full-fledged AI HR, which will most likely begin to take over part of the operational processes in the first half of this decade. As you know, the principle of operation of a simple neural network is performing repetitive or similar actions, which is monotonous and tedious work for a person, but not for AI. For recruiting, there will be aggregator programs for finding candidates from the most famous online resources, there will also be many not entirely ethical parser programs that also collect user data from personal pages, but that software will have to be used with caution so as not to collect more data than necessary. Using the API, aggregators will upload databases with collected data about potential candidates to a program for selecting through testing, the setting of which will be done by HR or outsourcer, then the candidates undergo a more accurate selection for qualifications, through an interview, which can also be carried out by an outsourcing agency, whose experts, at the end of the interview of candidates, will prepare a recommendation for the candidate whom the organization should hire. After being admitted to the organization, the candidate undergoes an accelerated adaptation program on a special ?adaptainment? platform in which all the information necessary for the employee is provided through gamification. Documentation, including HR docs, which will now be completely in electronic format, also simplifies the work of HR and expands the capabilities of the software. Already proceeding from this, it can be understood that in the very near future for hiring and adaptation of specialists, technical skills, the skills of selecting the right software from the huge amount that the market will offer, will be crucial for HRs. Implementation, configuration and management of automation systems for sourcing, recruiting, onboarding, working with wiki platforms for creating and storing organizational knowledge and other knowledge management tools, as well as using online resources to manage remote workforce without compromising interaction and productivity. There are programs that can be used to monitor and manage employee involvement in work processes, take care of its physical and mental health, and prevent the possibility of burnout. It is quite possible that even such systems appear that will be work exclusively for the benefit of employees, it'll prompt him that it is time to change jobs and help to a worker with further employment. As you can see, technology will accompany the employee throughout their stay in the organization, and HR will act as the conductor of this technical orchestra, it'll determine how effective certain HR technologies used in the organization will be.

More freedom, wider potential

In addition, the skills of change management, development of HR strategies, the ability to understand the business and participate in its development will be no less competitive abilities of HR. Many organizations will give more rights and powers to their HR specialists, there will be no strict regulations to which HR should work, but only tasks related to its competence. HR is free to decide by what methods the task will be implemented, with the help of its own forces or some part it decides to delegate to outsourcing or optimize with the help of technologies. Being a technology-oriented specialist and knowing the rules of modern business is not as difficult as it seems, for this it will be enough to reinforce existing knowledge with new ones from the Internet, there is no doubt that it is there that knowledge will always be the freshest and most relevant. HR needs to be an active member of HR forums, read articles on sites for entrepreneurs, view webinars from HR experts with a name in their industry, and of course, gain knowledge in online courses. We are living in the initial period of the 4th industrial revolution, and we hear how expert-futurists  from the business world talk about dying professions, many experts even add such a seemingly irreplaceable profession as a CEO to their lists. As for HR, the importance of this profession for business is only growing, especially if Game Over really comes for the CEO. Once a bosses and other leaders leaves a company, the organization's prosperity will largely come from good human resources management.

If we summarize all of the above, then we can globally divide HR specialists into technologists who configure software and HR psychologists who ensure the performance of the organization's human resources. The profession of I/O psychologists is also gaining in demand, who will form and maintain a healthy working environment within the organization using exclusively their knowledge of psychology.

Spotlight of significance

Multinational organizations appear on the business arena, whose staff amazes with their geography. In addition to teams consisting of specialists from different countries, superteams with AI-employees will soon begin to appear, and interaction with which will require a special approach from human-specialists. Managing global talent and super teams are just a few of the responsibilities that HR will need to prepare for. Despite the similarity in the name of most of the responsibilities, they will require a new approach and new knowledge from HR. The responsibilities of HR, which will definitely never lose their relevance, are those that allow employees to be the most productive, that create the dynamics of the organization's development and affect competitiveness, namely, the responsibilities of motivating and inspiring employees. To create a sense of belonging to the organization by employees, HR will need to learn how to manage a “spotlight of significance”, with which it is possible to strengthen or weaken the sense of belonging in employees, which forms the greatest involvement of employees in organizational processes.

Will have to remain in demand

To create a comfortable and positive atmosphere, team buildings and corporate events will help, event agencies do an excellent job with these tasks, but taking care of the well-being of each individual employee is impossible without the personal approach of a staff HR who knows the characteristics of their personality. An individual approach is also necessary when assessing the competence of employees and the subsequent selection of training programs. Continuing about the importance of constant reinforcement of the knowledge base of specialists, it should be noted the emergence of rigor and some compulsion in the continuous training of employees, which will take place directly in the process of work. Further training will no longer remain at the discretion of the specialist and will entail undesirable consequences for the specialist if it does not want to update its knowledge. To assess the degree of competence of the organization's workers, specialized T&D services will come to the aid of HR, designed to test and verify the qualifications of specialists. For employees with reduced performance, the same services will offer to fill the existing skill gaps by offering to take a professional training course.

Caring for the organization's brand

Almost every HR understands the specifics of working in a new organization and in company, which is on everyone's lips. Recruiting talent is always easier if candidates stumble upon a job and see a familiar logo or a familiar brand name. Business owners without a popular name, do not want to be outsiders, so they involve not only a PR manager, but also an HR specialist who will take care of the image and ethics of the organization in the joint work on the formation of the digital brand of the organization. The formed image must certainly be maintained, one unethical step in our time for the organization may be the last. If the PR manager takes care of the organization, protecting of its ?facade?, then HR takes care from the inside, acting as a kind of keeper of the organization's culture.

Culture keepers

Many believe that culture is in every organization and this is something for granted, but then why has it been so actively talked about recently? Indeed, many organizations have their own culture, but often, it's just a document downloaded from the Internet. Even if it is a copy of the organizational culture of the Zappos company, it will not have a positive impact on the internal environment of the organization if the culture is not promoted. In organizations without a culture keeper, there will always be some disorientation in the team, which will eventually give rise to its own informal culture, uncontrollable and originating from a small group of people or a specific employee who took on the role of team leader. It is not possible to predict where such a leader will lead an organization, therefore it is so important that the culture in the organization is proclaimed and guides it along a given vector of development, and the one who will protect the culture must also allow it to be flexible and adjust to the realities of our dynamic world.

New wave

Actually, not everything in the world changes as rapidly as technologies develop, some processes in the organization change with the speed of generational change. We live in a period of time when half of the working population are Millennials, whose priorities when choosing a job, as a rule, still include money and career growth, and the old organizational culture is focused on meeting precisely these needs. But a new Generation Z has appeared on the labor market and has already entered the struggle for jobs. For them, the old culture of the organization no longer corresponds to their values, money still has its weight, but it is not a decisive factor in choosing a job. Therefore, HR has a number of tasks that need to be solved without delay. To maintain balance in the organization, HR needs to act between generations not as a mediator representing the interests of each generation individually, but as a liaison everyone with each other, finding and implementing common values in the culture of the organization. In working on creating an inclusive culture, HR will have to face such a problem as the rejection of the traditional organizational hierarchy by the Zoomers, because for them there are no authorities, communication with the boss, as they believe, should be on an equal footing, no one owes anyone, everyone in the organization is equal and important. Mental comfort, lack of pressure and a sense of belonging to what they create are what matters to them. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to change the traditional management system or even remove it altogether when it comes to existing organizations, not startups. Vertical management of organizational processes is an integral standard, the key to the success of an organization, ensuring a high level of productivity and competitiveness. But whatever high performance indicators such a traditional management system does not guarantee, business owners understand that in some modern tasks there is no equivalent alternative to Zoomers, even HR specialists have different levels of competence between generations, if some are almost intuitively versed in technological innovations that make it possible to provide competitiveness of the organization, then it is just as easy for other generations to work with a human personality, for which need experience gained over the years of continuous practice. If the mechanisms for recruiting employees from the previous generation have long been known and they practically do not change, then in order to attract young blood, need to revise business methods, especially the management and remuneration systems, the business will have to globally approach these changes. It is necessary to build a new culture of the organization practically on the ruins of the old one, and an HR specialist acts as an architect. It must have a basic knowledge of psychology, and constantly in contact with technology, it has an idea of the structure of the modern economy including the gig economy, and follows the trends that dictate the rules of the game to Generation Z. For HR, the possession of this knowledge is already enough to develop a new organization culture, to attract and retain young specialists, an inclusive culture that will involve tham in the organization's work processes, allowing them to unleash their full potential.

Remote team

In addition to the Zoomers, there is another significant part of the working population that now requires special attention, these are remote workers. Currently, there are no solutions yet that allow a remote team to do work with the same productivity as office workers. It doesn't matter if the remote worker made their own choice or was forced to work outside the office, for the organization it must be of equal value. In the tasks of an HR specialist, enable a remote employee to feel like a full-fledged part of the team. Even when deprived of the usual attributes of an office environment and work atmosphere, a remote worker must take part in the life of the organization and treat its duties with the same degree of responsibility as an office worker. At the moment, solving this pressing problem is important both for the organization and for the remote workers themselves, and methods such as employee time tracking, online remote activity monitoring and other remote control systems will not help us to solve it, all of them only increase the distance between the employee and the organization and prevent the formation of trusting relationships. It is likely that in the near future there will be an optimal solution to this problem, and it is possible that a separate competence, conventionally called HR RT, will even appear for working with a remote team, in the toolkit of which there will be an effective way to improve the productivity of a remote worker. Will this competence be more technical, in the form of a virtual office with full immersion in the working atmosphere, or psychological, which provides training for employees for new working conditions, and requires an HR specialist with an average base of knowledge of psychology, or rather knowledge of organizational behavior, which will allow him to develop special adaptation programs for remote employees. Perhaps the solution lies in a special system of remuneration, or rather reinforcement, for the formation of the behavior of remote workers that would satisfy the goals of the organization. Opposite measures are not excluded in the form of toughening the requirements for a remote team and the exemplary application of sanctions for attempts to encroach on the values of the organization, and other deviant behavior of remote employees, which, as history shows us, also helped to find a way out of difficult situations.

To the topic of the problem associated with the remote command, can also add those that many have already encountered. For example, the imposition of human roles on top of each other. If earlier people managed to switch between their work and family roles on the path between home and work, now this path is absent, hence informal behavior in relation to the team arises, for example, the manifestation of rudeness, excessive dominance or a public demonstration by the employee in front of people living with him on one living space, its superiority and excessive importance to the organization. In addition to these pretentious employees, "outstaff employees" may also appear in the organization, in the person of the spouses of a remote worker, who do not hesitate to give their "expert" assessment of the organization's work processes. Apparently this is only a small part of the problems that organizations will face when working with a remote team, and solving each of them separately, this means adapting to each type of personality of a remote worker. No matter how radical it may sound, but the easiest way to get rid of this problem for organizations is to “turn off” the very personality in which the employee is used to being at home, to do this, it is necessary to use rituals and attributes that allow a person to enter the role of an employee. The last, relatively speaking, today problem that exists in the business environment is the work of a remote employee simultaneously in several organizations, which affects the productivity of remote employees and negatively affects the performance of the organization. The solution to this problem, most likely, will not be in favor of organizations, since prohibiting employees from engaging in outside activities means losing a significant amount of talent, so organizations will most likely have to come to terms and accept these conditions.

Remote work and a reborn organizational culture are a new round of labor activity, for which both employees and employers must be prepared, and as soon as we realize this, we will step into a new world that promises to "save" us from work.

Vacancy for HR

For some, there will be a reduction in working hours and for them the work will be more like a hobby, but for someone without full retraining, there may not be work at all. We only need to monitor how the world is changing and how employees and organizations are adjusting to these changes. Compared to all organizations trying to create an inclusive environment, the Association "My Way", which is a pioneer in introducing the Sustart sustainable development methodology into its Culture and Articles of Association, went farthest. The members of the Association believe that this methodology will solve most of the problems that the world business community faces today.

“We want to believe that by our successful example we will be able to demonstrate to the world that there are alternative methods of doing business. To convey to the world community the understanding that it is time to stop patching holes in the bottom of a sinking ship, this only delays the inevitable and inhibits the development of technical and economic progress, it is time to board a new ship with a bottom more resistant to damage and which most sustainable on the waves of technical and social progress. Only global business reforms will help the world economy stay afloat and continue to provide social well-being to people no matter where they are."

The strong and fast My Way ship, sails exclusively in "blue oceans", where there is no competition and where no one has to try to survive, but at the moment there is not enough crew on board, so the Association is actively looking for a HR manager to work with a remote team. You can help us speed up the search by sharing this vacancy with your HR acquaintances, or you can take part in the project yourself by passing the initial testing.

This article was created only so that we could discuss important topics for HR today, so I invite you in the comments where, probably, during our conversation, no less interesting information regarding the near future of HR will appear. Please, follow all the rules of decency. I would also like to add an explanation that despite the existence of more than forty types of specialization related to the HR profession, this article provides a generalized understanding of this profession, it all depends on which organization we are talking about, if one HR generalist is enough for a small business, then in large companies, these are entire HR departments in which highly specialized HR specialists will work. In this article, as an example, you can use medium-sized organizations, since the largest flow of human resources from the labor market is directed specifically to medium-sized businesses.

? 2021 Sustart

When copying and reposting this article, include a link to the source.