Workplace challenges: qpeople’s top 5 HR trends for 2024

Although we’re drawing further away from the tumultuous events of 2020, their impact is still resonating across our social, cultural and economic landscape.

Businesses that successfully navigated the existential challenges that erupted during this period continue to face fresh hurdles as we embark on an era defined by new priorities and by the wholescale transformation of organisational culture necessary to accommodate a changing world of work.

Important workplace shifts – including persistent skills shortages, rapidly evolving HR technologies and increased pressure to optimise operational efficiencies – requires that employers not only be more agile but also more highly focused on cultivating the trusted relationships that underpin progress.

The issues that prevailed last year – adapting to hybrid working, embracing and advancing policies and practices around diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) and recruiting and retaining talent – mean that renewed emphasis on learning and development (L&D) must be an essential element in the HR manifesto for 2024. ?

At qpeople, we believe that the businesses that continue to drive organisational change by empowering leaders and their teams to develop and refine their skills, and rewarding staff with the career paths they want and deserve, will be the ones with the resources to exploit new opportunities and the resilience to weather the next storm.

1. Leadership development

In a recent report by Gartner, surveying the view of more than 500 HR leaders, 75% of respondents said that their organisation’s managers were overwhelmed by an increase in their responsibilities, with almost as many (73%) believing their leaders weren’t equipped to lead change – a view supported by 50% of employees, according to the study.

Addressing these deeply ingrained issues is complex. In part, it involves an operational reset: ensuring leaders and managers have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities, at the same time creating a carefully constructed pipeline that’s designed to give candidates the opportunity to see if leadership is the right fit for them (and to normalise different kinds of career progression).

But it’s also crucial to take a more adaptive approach to leadership development – moving away from the old-school emphasis on strategy development and financial analysis skills, and, instead, prioritising the relational, communication, and problem-solving attributes that will prepare managers (and not just those in the top-tier C-suite roles) for the challenges ahead.

Last year, we spoke about supporting leaders to be more authentic and empathetic – to have the emotional intelligence to make better decisions in the here and now, while also championing the strategies that underpin long-term success, such as employee wellbeing, productivity and engagement.

We stand by this position and further predict that forward-thinking organisations will begin to instigate the highly personalised and contextualised L&D programmes that foster and promote these increasingly essential leadership qualities.

2. Continuous learning culture

Obviously, it’s not just leaders who should be reframing their approach to L&D. As businesses endeavour to stay ahead of the curve, they’ll have to be even more keenly aware of the need to align employee skills with organisational goals – something that can’t be achieved via a one-size-fits-all programme.

As the pace of technological change accelerates, the scale of the challenge becomes apparent: the requirement to completely rethink and re-route learning pathways in a workplace transformed by hybrid and remote working practices.

Ensuring employees acquire and extend the knowledge-based and soft skills they need to thrive personally and professionally in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environment is key. It is these imperatives that should determine L&D activity; trying to map existing, outdated programmes into the needs of a rapidly evolving business is an exercise in futility.

Personalised learning programmes – designed to match desired outcomes to individual learning needs – are already beginning to replace more formal approaches. The CIPD’s Learning at Work 2023 survey emphasised the need for organisations to prioritise evidence-informed principles such as reflection and learning transfer over content and programme creation.

We think that 2024 will see a continued pivot to these more strategic learning principles as businesses try to capitalise on their talent. It’s a shift that favours the provision of a wider range of learning options, including micro-learning and micro-mentoring, as well as peer and performance coaching opportunities.

In this fast-moving, iterative workplace, organisations will need to foster a continuous learning culture to ensure employees are not only regularly and actively learning new skills but are also refining and improving existing policies and practices. In the spirit of ‘what got us here, won’t get us there’, we’ll certainly need fresh perspectives to resolve the technological, cultural and ethical problems that lie ahead.

3. Digital transformation of learning

Delivering a continuous learning culture means embracing deep, company-wide digital transformation, too.

Research by McKinsey predicts that by 2030 the skills needed in the workplace will be many times removed from those valued today – an assumption supported by the recent acceleration of innovations in transformative technologies like generative AI. Pairing personalised learning methods with facilitative technology – including AI, augmented reality and virtual reality – will offer organisations a new opportunity to improve their strategic capabilities.

A clearly defined digital HR strategy is an essential first step but careful consideration will have to be given to issues such as how the tech cycle will be managed, how tech will impact roles and responsibilities and what the risks of adoption are.

HR departments are already using learning management systems (LMS) to help businesses create, track, and measure employee L&D programmes – especially for routine processes such as onboarding – and some are exploring AI-enabled learning experience platforms (LXP) to deliver more personalised programmes with analytics components that are designed to measure individual success and evaluate corporate ROI.

But, implementing the digital transformation of workforce L&D is about more than leveraging cool tools and tech. Done properly, it represents a fundamental shift in an organisation's culture, processes, and strategies with the aim of becoming more agile, responsive and innovative.

So, while learning leaders should keenly monitor emerging tech tools and their impact on training and skills development, the overriding focus should be on designing and deploying adaptive learning systems that are aligned with broader developments in the digital ecosystem and with longer term business goals.

4. Data-driven decision making

Delivering digital transformation requires practical commitment as well as ideological intention. Theoretically, all businesses appreciate the value of data in the decision-making process, but its practice needs to be embedded in a culture that prizes critical thinking and professional curiosity to become the norm.

The sheer quantity of data that’s being collected today is staggering, as is the complexity of the data itself, which makes it increasingly difficult to analyse. In its 2022 executive survey, leadership consultancy NewVantage Partners reported that although the overwhelming majority (98.6 percent) of executives aspired to create a data-driven culture in their organisations, less than a third (32.4 %) felt that they’d been successful. Which shows that implementing tech investments without building a data culture to support it is a risky strategy.

Unsurprisingly, generative AI solutions are being seen as the most logical path for organisations looking to analyse the vast amounts of learning data available to provide actionable insights to L&D professionals. GenAI-enabled systems can identify trends, uncover knowledge gaps, and highlight areas where additional training may be useful. It’s these highly granular insights that will enable HR teams to make the data-driven decisions needed to underpin the cycle of continuous learning that are key to progress.

But, as AI is more widely and vigorously deployed, so ethical considerations are likely to come into sharper focus. The NewVantage executive report also pointed out that less than half the organisations surveyed (44.2 %) claimed to have sound policies and practices governing the responsible use of data, with under a quarter (21.6 %) of data executives convinced that enough was being done to address data and AI ethics issues.

5. Career management

GenAI issues aside, possibly the biggest challenge facing HR leaders in 2024 is the same as the previous year: how to attract and retain talent in an ultra-competitive marketplace.

Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report shows that while employee engagement is on the rise (23 % of employees reported they were thriving at work), it’s a trend that’s dwarfed by the volume of so-called ‘quiet quitters’ (59 %), who are putting in minimum effort and watching the clock. Not only are these employees barely productive, but they are also likely to be more stressed because of their sense of personal and professional disconnection.

And yet, perhaps surprisingly, quiet quitters represent a big opportunity for growth and change – they are waiting to be inspired and motivated and are primed to be turned into more productive team members. Supporting employees’ career ambitions will not only help businesses to hold on to top talent but will also drive corporate growth and productivity.

How, then, to create and communicate clear career development pathways (horizontal, as well as vertical) to employees? Normalising internal career progression is key – aligning business needs with individuals’ skills, interests and goals, while providing employees with as many opportunities as possible to explore and experience new roles and access L&D resources – including mentoring and coaching support.

This ‘adaptive’ approach to career design offers employees the tools and the scope to trial new responsibilities and learn fresh skills in a safe and supportive environment. It fosters loyalty and invites greater engagement – which not only leads to more informed career choices for the individual but better talent outcomes for the organisation.

A report by the CIPD at the beginning of 2023 flagged the recruitment and retention of people with the right skills as the single biggest opportunity for improving organisational performance – we think this will continue to be an urgent priority for 2024.

?? So are you ready to challenge the status quo and lead the pack? Ask yourself: Will you be a workplace disrupter or a trend-follower? ?? ??I look forward to our conversations #HRInnovation #FutureLeaders #ChallengeTheNorms