It’s a hard job to be in HR nowadays?
The truth is no matter the scale or industry type you’re operating in, the quality of your workforce will directly and significantly impact your organisational success. Innovation is the king and constant change the queen.
It’s no surprise, then, that HR managers struggle to refine and reinforce their strategies around hiring, engaging, and retaining employees. And this is the most demanding part of the job if the workforce is here to stay. Hence, the workforce management blueprint will also include task scheduling, compensation, benefits, communications, coaching, training, talent development, and other vital areas. To cover all these aspects successfully, HR managers must be not only open-minded and flexible but also well-equipped and acquainted with technology, data processing and most of all – it all must be integrated into the so-called employee experience…
This is why I decided to dedicate some space on our blog to what I see is the main challenge of contemporary HR management and highlight the directions of its further development.
part 1 – diversified teams management
From the Gen Z entering your office to extended tenures for Baby Boomers, 2019’s workplace is poised to be a diverse and dynamic environment.
To start let’s talk about people, as an increasingly valuable and crucial asset of a company. The main question seems to be, how to manage diverse demands and needs of contemporary employees to get the best possible results (ideally at a low cost). We are managing a highly dynamic workforce and employee requirements which, are constantly in flux. However, this is not the whole picture yet. The workforce is increasingly diversified. This raises our challenge exponentially.
The diversity of the workforce appears in several dimensions. These can be, for example, the generation gap, cultural diversity or simply the way of employment. They may be of different importance in various parts of the globe as, for instance, the US job market differs significantly from the European. Some are quite well explored, as for example, global enterprises are used to intercultural diversity of their workforce. But all together, they create a sphere of circumstances that clearly influence the way contemporary HR managers do their jobs.
So, first of all, we name the diversity of the generations. Over the last five years, millennials have taken up leadership roles and strategic positions, across companies and organisational levels. In 2019, the first line of Gen-Z professionals enters the workplace, adding another layer of complexity for HR managers. Interestingly, Baby Boomers, who normally would now be retiring, with thread to the skills shortage and leadership challenges, are increasingly choosing to stay on beyond the age of sixty-five. Altogether these phenomena — leading to extremely diverse and multigenerational teams – create a managerial challenge. The HR managers must maintain a careful balance between disruptive technology deployment and seamless legacy transformation. In other words – workforce management techniques must respond to untypical generational shifts.
In addition to the age dimension, the globalization of business and ease of international mobility has brought about cultural and language diversity even in traditionally uniform societies (like in the case of Poland). Demography, economic integration of EU and political events (like, for example, Russian annexation of the Kremlin), have added to increased migration of people. Polish citizens have, apparently, chosen Great Britain, Germany, and other European destinations but at the same time, citizens of Ukraine chose Poland. And people migrate with their culture. Hence, more and more domestic companies (even the SMEs) must accept cultural diversity and learn to manage it if they want to maintain the effectiveness of their workforce.
Last but not least, as a manifestation of demand for freedom and elasticity, we observe increased diversity in the form of employment. The so-called GIG economy is gaining its momentum. As companies choose contingent workforce for a larger portion of supply services, workforce management tools must extend beyond the transactional part. HR managers have to explore contingent workforce management solutions, freelance hiring apps, and most of all – remote worker management solutions. All these keeping in line with the fiscal and regulatory demands, which in some cases can be really complicated.
While hiring, engaging, and retaining employees, large companies usually use their own HR resources and recruiters with some external recruiters or executive search companies to cover all these aspects successfully. They must be not only open-minded and flexible but also well-equipped and acquainted with technology, data processing, and most of all – it all must be integrated. Sounds expensive, isn’t it?
Therefore many smaller businesses limit HR management to their own devices (it’s usually the owner who hires) and just administer the payroll.
But the scarcity of workforce and complexity of HR issues force even the SMEs to apply professional advice and solutions. And as the market grows, they become more and more affordable. It is, therefore, a Raison d’être for REVIT.HR to deliver such advice and solutions and to serve as a cloud-based HR manager.
author: Karolina Wysocka
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