It looks like remote working is here to stay, but does this mean that HR professionals are ready to embrace most of their workforce becoming digital nomads, or is there still more to do on the workplace culture front before the acceptance of working from home and remote working is going to be the norm? Here are some speculations on the future of remote working.
Remote Challenges
For most human resources professionals, the job itself is intrinsically linked to people. Making sure people’s working lives are as happy and healthy as they can possibly be, as well as organizing people and communicating with people.
This can be a really tough thing to do when your people are spread out, possibly within a few miles of each other but in more extreme cases even across the globe.
For human resources specialists in this new way of working, in this new normal, the future is uncertain right now, but one of the few things that we can be sure of is that not being adaptable and not being flexible is going to hamper your ability to survive in the new working world.
Hiring Managers Will Consider A More Diverse Range Of skills
It is part of a human resources specialist’s job to make sure that internal teams are working to the best of their abilities, and that can also include hiring people to join the team.
This can be a tough job to do when your team has suddenly become remote. How can you hire someone to join a team who knows each other in person when the person joining them may never meet the team in person and form the same bonds?
It is up to the hiring managers, and possibly the internal recruitment team, to ensure that they are hiring people who have a diverse skill set so that, when new people do join a high-performance team who already has a bond, the team can be sure that the people coming in and joining them have the skills and the ability to adapt and to react just as they do.
In the future, there will be a focus on hiring people with flexible and adaptable qualifications, such as a Master’s in Business Administration. This kind, of course, is a great idea for anyone looking to join an organization on the executive management side, especially for people in HR.
When interviewing somebody who has a degree in business administration, it is important to ask them what they got out of their degree. This article has some great tips for students considering undertaking a master’s in business administration that may be useful for HR professionals to use when considering hiring someone who already has an MBA.
Automation and AI Will Be A Big Threat (and a big bonus)
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation will play a big role in businesses of the future, but what does this mean for HR jobs?
It depends on how HR professionals look at their job in isolation and their job with consideration to future prospects.
If you are not thinking of your HR job’s future and think that automation and artificial intelligence will not affect you, you are likely to be part of the group of people who will be left behind and possibly made redundant shortly.
However, embracing new technologies and new efficiencies could mean that you will be able to line yourself up for a higher-level job -with a better salary increase- a role that could be a good move in your career should you let it.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation are, in general, powerful tools at the disposal of businesses, but it is up to the HR professional themselves to decide how far a business will go when exploring these new options.
It is not right that HR professionals hold a business back when there could be a service that could do their job better, but at the same time, HR professionals will need to diversify their skill set to make sure they are ahead of the game when these robots come for their jobs.
Learning and Development in The Workplace Will Be Fostered
Hot on the heels of AI is the need to diversify workplace learning, and the workplace learning culture is going to be something that is important for all forward-thinking organizations over the next few years. It is part of the HR professional’s role to ensure that the teams under their control are inspired to get the best out of their workplace learning, and workplace learning is a culture that is fostered.
Some middle management people can feel threatened by my lower-ranking members of staff who are passionate about learning and developing their skills. The HR professional’s job is to mitigate this worry and inspire the lower-ranking staff members to continue developing and learning while also supporting the management who might be feeling threatened.
In some cases, these managers have every right to feel threatened if they refuse to move with the times and why businesses are being held back.
This is where an HR professional’s job is a difficult task because it may be that -as part of their role- they make recommendations for hiring and firing, especially when people are refusing to adapt and be flexible to new ways of doing things.
Supporting Employees from Afar Will Be A Challenge
Remote working throws up all sorts of challenges, but these challenges are made ten times more difficult when your team is working remotely in HR.
It is a delicate balance when your team is working remotely to offer your support and guidance while not making them feel like you are invading their personal space.
Working remotely is a new thing for many companies, and there are bound to be mistakes along the way. With that considered, now is a good time to get feedback from the workforce about the changes that are happening and how they feel about it.
The essence of working in HR is understanding how to communicate with all kinds of people and how to adapt communication to suit different situations. Whether you are supporting a colleague who has had a recent bereavement, or you are supporting colleagues with mental health issues, it is important to remain professional but also to lend an empathetic ear.
As much as the world of work is becoming more process orientated and theoretical, it is important to remember that you will be dealing with human beings. Human beings have their own life issues and their things going on; human beings are not robots; they are all different, and its part of a job of an HR professional to ensure that you take every person at face value and try to understand them as a human being as well as a number in your company, especially if your team is now newly remote.
HR Consultancy Will Grow
An interesting development that we are likely to see over the next few years in HR is the HR consultant’s rise.
As more businesses turn to automated methods and software programs to do the jobs that traditionally HR professionals may have done, this is the perfect time to expand your skills and experience by offering a consultancy service to different businesses and perhaps even going self-employed you are doing this.
Setting up your own business is a scary prospect for most people, and, for many people who went into HR and number of years ago as a career, this may be something they never considered before.
Even so, with the jobs market looking so uncertain in every industry, setting up as a self-employed contractor who does HR consultancy for several different clients could be a great way to protect your income against future fluctuations.
Many people who are switched on with the changes that are going on across the globe are beginning to wonder whether or not having all of their income coming from one source is a good idea? This has led to the rise in those considering whether or not doing freelancing consultancy, and contract work might be a better way to protect their finances against the imminent shutdowns and closures we are seeing across the globe?
While going freelance might not be something you want to consider, however, it may be the perfect time for you to think about diversifying your skill sets into similar areas, such as business leadership coaching, which has seen a big increase in demand over the last few months as more businesses try to keep their leadership teams and high-performance teams together and motivated during these difficult times
The role of an HR professional within an organization always has involved some coaching to a degree. This may be the perfect time for you to expand on that and give you the greatest missed opportunity to keep in touch with people and to make a real difference to people’s working lives, now and in the future.
