The world is changing with a rapid pace and organizations are striving hard to stay relevant in this hyper-competitive business scenario.

By the term ‘staying relevant’ I don’t mean that the business organizations are doing efforts to achieve operational excellence. In fact staying relevant means transforming the business model that it is based on, in order to make it a real workplace for future.

What I can foresee is that the HR professionals will have to play pivotal role in the aforementioned transformation process. In fact they’ll be the pioneering force in creating a workplace that is aligned with the future’s needs. This would include leveraging new technologies, data management systems and many other things.

Today I will discuss trends that will play primary role in transforming workplace and HR during the next decade.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence

According to various researches, nearly 50% of current jobs across the globe will be lost in the next 10 years as a result of the automation and artificial intelligence. We already have humans and robots working side by side in quite a few companies. Since the human skills are not keeping up with technological developments and robots are becoming cheaper, the replacement of humans in various job roles would ultimately become inevitable. This unwanted development would result in a number of ethical workplace dilemmas. The HR professionals will be required to maintain a healthy balance between human and robotic labor. In short, HR will be responsible for providing professional challenges to human labor in order to maximize their creative potential and to make them contribute more value than their robotic counterparts. The ROI metric will no more be based on the number of outputs, but on the quality of the creative outputs.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

It can be easily predicted that the virtual and augmented reality will impact many corporate functions like the recruitment, training, collaboration and a lot more. It is a fact that the companies across globe spend significant amounts on recruitment each year. In the next decade, virtual reality and augmented reality are going to become fundamental tools for HR operations. The virtual reality will be used for evaluating candidates. This will also empower the recruiters to assess skills of shortlisted candidates in real-time. Moreover, the companies across globe currently spend significant amounts on training of their employees, roughly 50% of which is a result of travel, facilities and equipment. The virtual reality will provide 3D scenarios which will let employees fully grasp the information and principles taught during a training module. To cut the long story short, HR department will have to redesign itself and become more tech savvy. This will allow them to manage resources in a better way, provide effective solutions and provide greater ROI to the company.

The Death of Performance Management (As We Know It)

The current PM approach which is based on the annual rating is eventually going to die. Although everybody knows that the current performance management approach is demotivating and disengaging and doesn’t tackle the issue of low performance or rewards high performance, it remains to be the big elephant in HR room. However, during the next ten years, a new approach would replace the current one. The new approach would rely on the fundamental needs of the millennials to receive continuous and timely feedback. It’s going to be an agile strategy — it’s a coaching and human development approach. In the future offices, people’s performance wouldn’t be based on ratings or yearly assessments. Instead, the organizations would want their employees to unleash their creative potential. HR will be a cornerstone in redirecting performance marketing towards this coaching and human development approach.

A Different Leadership Approach

During the next decade, there’ll be a significant change in leadership style as there is going to be more focus on individual development, collaboration, innovation and the use of technology. Again it comes down to HR to train the new cadre of up-and-coming leaders. It can be easily foreseen that by 2020, more than 75% of the workforce will comprise of millennials. This means that all the companies should quickly get ready for transition between the two dramatically different leadership styles (baby boomers vs. millennials). It has been found that majority of the companies and HR professionals are yet unaware of the radical changes that will take place during this transition.

Conclusion

The Human Resource department will continue to be under pressure to become more strategic and innovation-oriented. HR professionals are supposed to be the pioneering force throughout this transformation procedure that is going to define our future workplace. To make this happen, HR professionals will have to maximize the use of HR technology, data management and cutting-edge innovation.

Also Read: Does My Organization Need HR Representative?