The past few years have seen our professional lives transformed by new technologies and ways of working. It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come. Video calls and flexible working are the norm for most businesses. We rely on an array of cloud-hosted applications to carry out routine daily tasks. All of which, just five years ago, would have seemed quite novel.
As the pace of change has increased, HR have had to tackle a range of new challenges. How can they help staff adapt to new ways of working and protect them the burnout associated with near-constant disruption? How should they develop the skills required to make use of new technologies such as AI? How can they attract and retain talent in an increasingly competitive job market?
These days, HR moves fast. And tech HR moves faster than most. In this post, we’ll take a look at a few tech HR trends that will become increasingly important over the next five years.
Building critical skills and competencies
New roles and new technologies are entering the market with each passing day. As a result, upskilling and reskilling have become key priorities for HR decision-makers. In Mercer’s Talent Trends Report 2019, building these new skills went from ninth on the executive agenda to third in just one year.
“HR professionals will need to keep a close eye on the R&D landscape.”
The most in-demand skills named in the report are machine learning, blockchain and deep learning – a form of machine learning that relies heavily on neural networks. Over the next few years, HR professionals will need to keep a close eye on the R&D landscape in order to identify the skill sets and technologies that will go on to replace these.
Current & future leadership bench
Back in 2017, Kraft Heinz caused a stir when they named the then 29-year old David Knopf their global Chief Financial Officer. The profile of the C-Suite is changing. It isn’t just becoming younger, it is becoming more diverse in terms of age, gender and nationality.
Age is no longer a helpful indicator of leadership potential. Indeed, many of the most pressing challenges the C-Suite will face over the next five years will be unfamiliar to people who grew up in the pre-digital age. In order to overcome these challenges, executives will need a broad base of personal and professional experience. And it will be the task of HR to find the right mix of skills, personalities, backgrounds and experiences.
Employee experience
Burnout and distraction are already massive issues in the tech industry. In one survey, 57% of industry professionals reported they were struggling with burnout at work. In one business, over 70% of employees said this was the case.
Combating the negative impact of ‘tech overload’ and long hours is already a challenge for HR teams – and one that will become more important over the next five years. HR and facilities teams are investing more time and effort in creating physical and digital solutions that declutter and destress.
Tech companies that don’t address these problems will find themselves struggling to hold onto key staff. 95% of respondents to one HR survey said that burnout undermines workforce retention.
Organisational design and change management
Innovation and disruption are no longer the exception, they are the norm – and businesses are already reskilling and reorganising themselves to adjust to this new state of play. Over the coming years, effective change management will become a massive competitive advantage. Businesses who can adapt quickly and adopt new ways of working will innovate faster and better.
In fact, the notion of change management may even be replaced by ‘continuous development’. This is a phrase that anyone in the tech industry will be familiar with. It refers to the continuous fine-tuning and development of a digital product. HR teams will increasingly function in a similar way, introducing and optimising new tools and processes on an ongoing basis, rather than every now and again.
Talent analytics
Hiring the right staff is vital. However, hiring decisions are often made instinctively. Did we connect with the candidate? Do we feel like they’d be a good fit?
“Analytics of this sort is particularly useful in challenging unconscious biases.”
Talent analytics helps companies make recruitment decisions based on data. By looking at candidates’ psychometric profiles and comparing them with the requirements of the role and the profiles of team members, talent analytics can assess whether someone will be a good fit. Analytics of this sort is particularly useful in challenging unconscious biases, which is only going to become more of a priority as we seek to build more diverse and well-rounded teams.
If you want to learn more about talent analytics, you can find out how Identifi Global and our psychometrics partner Psycruit use psychometrics data to help match candidates with ideal roles and employers.
Recruiting
Tech recruitment is already fiercely competitive. The fight for top talent has resulted in HR teams playing a more active role in branding and content production, as they look to appeal to would-be employees in much the same way as marketing appeals to would-be customers.
This trend is likely to continue. HR teams have already started to use programmatic advertising as a way of targeting applicants. And recruiters are likely to start to operate more and more like marketing teams as they adopt an ‘inbound’ rather than an ‘outbound’ approach.
Aside from the technology, HR teams will also be more involved in brand-level discussions, helping to shape the brand, mission, vision and values in a way that will appeal to applicants as well as customers. In fact, according to the Mercer Talent Trends Report 2019, smart recruiters are even flexing their employee branding to target in-demand skill sets such as programming and developing.
Future of work
Flexible working has already given employees more control over where and when they work. The struggle to attract key skill sets mentioned earlier in this piece will push this trend even further. Unable to find the talent they need in their local area, employers will start to advertise ‘location neutral’ roles for talent with the skill sets they need. Workers with these skills will be able to make greater demands in terms of salaries and bonuses, as well as where and when they work.
At the other end of the spectrum, HR teams will need to deal with the full impact of AI. Over the next few years, the repercussions of AI will start to be felt. Our working lives will become increasingly symbiotic. HR teams will need to carefully manage the introduction of automated tools and technologies. Inevitably, some jobs will be affected. Reskilling and reallocating staff will be one way of coping. Some redundancies are also likely to occur, and Tech HR teams may need to create new policies for dealing with these situations.
Diversity & inclusion
Workplace diversity and inclusion has never been higher on the agenda. The past few years have seen the majority of large businesses acknowledge their past shortcomings and adopt more progressive and inclusive diversity policies. Which is hardly surprising, since companies with more diversity bring in 19% higher revenue and are 1.7 times more likely to be innovators in their fields than those without.
The tech sector has been criticised for lagging behind other industries. Over the coming years, tech companies will be able to use suitably high-tech ways to improve their diversity. AI will be used to challenge decision makers’ unconscious biases around age, gender, race and other demographic factors. And workforce analytics will be able to provide real-time feedback on the effectiveness of diversity policies.
Performance management trends
Traditional approaches to performance management, such as annual reviews and objective setting, have long been considered outdated. Criticisms include the subjectivity of the analysis and once-a-year reviews being too sporadic to change behaviour or add value. As a result, innovators such as GE, Microsoft and Netflix have all dropped the standard model for reviewing and rating performance.
Over the next few years, tools which gather and collate 360° feedback from team mates and customers will replace manual feedback gathering. Similarly, quantitative data from timesheets, calendars and project management platforms such as Trello or Slack will be drawn into performance analytics dashboards. All of these will provide a more reliable account of an employee’s strengths and weaknesses.
What Tech HR trends can you see on the horizon?
It’s a challenging and fascinating time to work in tech HR. Keeping up to date with the latest trends in the industry and working out how best to respond has never been more important. If you can think of any trends that we’ve missed, we’d love to hear them. Just drop us a line on LinkedIn or Twitter. And you can click here for more information on how we help HR teams with their recruitment and management challenges.
