Top 5 HR Priorities in the Year Ahead

What are your top HR priorities for 2021?

At Transition Solutions, we have been helping companies and individuals with workforce changes for 30 years.

The world of HR is ever changing. This past year has elevated the importance of managing people well during a time of global turmoil. Now as we look forward to 2021, many HR leaders are planning their key areas of focus. Greg Pryor, executive director at Workday recently shared what he believes will be the top 5 priorities for HR managers in the year ahead.

Pryor states, “The pandemic has accelerated and amplified this shift, leaving us today with five business and talent imperatives, which I think about as the IDEAS for a changing world of HR. IDEAS is an acronym for the five imperatives: inclusion, digitalization, enabling experiences, agile organization, and the skills imperative.” We’ve summarized these for you below.

  1. Inclusion. According to a McKinsey 2020 report, almost half of the survey respondents did not feel very included in their organizations. That same report found that most employees, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, said they encountered barriers to a sense of inclusion. Inclusion is about creating workplace principles and practices that nurture a sense of belonging and psychological safety where all people can do their best work. When people feel included, they’re more willing to take risks, which lead to innovation and contribution.
  • Digitalization. What does that mean in the context of HR? While we have digitized information, processes, and practices, we have only begun leveraging the democratization of data with the power of machine learning to automate and augment talent practices so that we can elevate essential human capabilities. We want our employee experiences to echo our consumer experiences, which are about nudges, whether it’s Amazon, Google, Netflix, and so on. It’s the idea of predicting the insight, learning, coaching, role, or connection that’s relevant to helping enable your success and curating that content in the context or flow of your work.
  • Enabling experiences. This is the idea of engineering experiences that unlock and unleash employees’ contributions, connections, capabilities, and career to deliver remarkable results. Just as our consumer experience has evolved, the digitalization and democratization of data now positions us to reinvent the enabling experiences we need to provide to employees. Increasingly, employees will apply their consumer experiences to the workplace, expecting to be surprised and delighted with a learning recommendation, mentoring connection, or internal gig assignment that will help them grow their highest-priority skill.
  • Agility. To compete in a more dynamic, fast-paced world, we increasingly need to think about how quickly we are adapting to changes in the competitive landscape, at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Automating and augmenting work by extending expertise enables the level of agility required in the new world of work. If this was ever in doubt, 2020 has shown us why it’s so important.
  • Skills. These are the new currency in our changing world of work. Skills are about transforming capabilities into this new currency to accurately and equitably evaluate, find, and develop talent, providing everyone with an equal opportunity to succeed, advance, and excel. Skills activate the first four imperatives. According to the World Economic Forum, due to changes in technology and also economic drivers, 42% of jobs will require different skills in the next three years. And more than 1 billion workers will require reskilling by 2030. Imagine understanding what skills people have versus what skills they want, and then curating specific work for them. Machine learning could enable this ability and as we face a growing skills gap, make it essential.

HR and business leaders will need to continue to adapt to meet the needs of their companies and teams as we look ahead to 2021. When difficult staffing changes need to take place, Transition Solutions is here to help.

At Transition Solutions, we’ve been helping organizations and individuals with outplacement needs for 30 years. We have developed a robust personalized and customized approach to every situation. Our strong reputation for consistently delivering exceptional service at value sets us apart.

If you would like more information on our services please check out our website at http://www.transitionsolutions.com or you can contact us directly at 888-424-0003 or email us at info@transitionsolutions.com