The Transition of HR Trends: The Move from Human Resources to People Operations
What is human resources (HR)? It's exactly how it sounds - it's the people who take part as resources to allow you to run your business. However, you often hear 'HR' in reference to the organizational function of managing and developing resources in relation to employees. It is the function within your organization that focuses on your people, such as, recruiting, hiring, training, performance management, and compensation. People are at the heart of HR. What does this have to do with HR trends? Take a look at where the focus of HR trends have moved in the past few years:
- 2015: technology adoption to support and engage people to be more productive
- 2016: the employee experience, taking into account, the work environment, the tools and technology that enable their productivity, and the learning opportunities that allow them to do their best work
- 2017: employee well-being, satisfaction, and engagement, through enabling HR technology to help build a progressive work culture
As HR trends develop each year, the focus of human resources doesn't change: it's consistently about your people. HR is about finding ways to support your employees during their time spent helping you to grow your business. These HR trends tell us that we will continue to think outside of traditional HR to incorporate technology and data. The purpose of HR is to grow your business by supporting the operations of your people.
What HR trends will we see in 2018?
There are many factors that will impact the year ahead for businesses and their employees. Of course, technology is top on that list. Trends in HR continue to leverage technology with a focus on people. In 2018, we'll see a shift from employee engagement to employee experience, and with this, a race to make HR digital. Having the right technology in place can support your business to understand your biggest asset - your people. Technologies, such as AI, VR, and machine learning will:
- Allow you to develop new ways of engaging with and managing your employees;
- Help you to provide learning and performance support; and
- Make people analytics actionable, especially when it comes to recruitment, hiring, and retaining top talent.
The question is, can we build HR software that will help us to improve productivity and allow teams to work better together? This will be an exciting year for technology and HR. What do you have planned for HR in 2018?
