HR Tech Trends of 2023 - The "Dos and Don'ts

It is time for self-reflection in a wild business world, where both time and innovation are always the most important resource any company has. Saving time through modernization has become exceptionally critical for organizations. Living in such a world is challenging, people are noticing how their lives have been turned around due to inflation, pandemic, and massive lay-offs. It is about time, we ask all the hard questions that need to be asked. Every year I do a piece about how technology can save us, and this year it is more relevant than ever to stress it. HR has gone through an immense transformation, from being focused on growth for the sake of growth to being employee-centered. The breathing space has been given to the employees by being concerned about their well-being, safety, and ease of work schedules. This year alone proved that teams had to work across the globe without physically meeting or being in the office, in in-person. This only proves the fact that technology was the only buoyancy for the drowning industry and acted as our savior.

We need space for constructive criticism, between all those 360-degree feedbacks are lives and human emotions in play. The time has come for re-thinking our way of dealing with this all, focus should shift towards more learning and development through intense training, as companies keep laying people off. The burden falls on the shoulders of the employees who have to step up as leaders in leadership roles and team heads.

HR has gone from managing employees, to being the sole reason a business survives, in-between lay-offs and hiring minimum possible staff, to surviving economic challenges, we have learned that systems have to evolve to cater to this unique scenario and the advancements of automation have to be incorporated, as much as we dislike. These are no times to have full teams dedicated to repetitive tasks, that can be automated through AI and smart, all-encompassing software, that have those capabilities. Year after year we have been repeating, a process of proving the need of additional staff by going through a complicated and unnecessary reporting format, that involves a month-to-date, quarterly-to date and year-to-date analytics ; hence, proving how the customer count, revenue and gross margins call for approaches that need automation in place, to fix the flaws of over-staffing.

We have seen in the past, how big tech has gone on an unjustified hiring spree to look good rather than have a real need to have multiple teams working over something that a few lines of code could have solved. It is always a mystery as to why that happens, we could try and justify that with one of the reasons being, that companies want to burn cash invested in them, to show growth and expansion and move on to raise more and show urgency, to need excessive money for a bigger round.

I wouldn’t want to deviate much further away from the topic, but having said that it is imperative to come up with solutions that are relevant to the changes in the modern-day businesses, something that provides relief. The trend, which I must say would not be a far-fetched reality as was assumed previously, is “AI and Automation in HR” . We need to bring relief to the managers, making hard decisions in a unique situation like this.

The hottest HR trends to look out for in 2023:

1.  Focus on learning and development, hands-on training, and bite-sized learning for career development

2.  Flexible work hours, more space for personal growth

3.  Gender and pay equality, a uniformity in wages across the industry without discriminating the genders, and greater inclusivity

4.  More focus on managerial duties, empowering the team leads and leaders at work with better tools, to enhance their workplace efficiency… Mostly through automation

5.  HR systems that encompass privacy of the information, keeping in focus the “California privacy act” that goes into effect on Jan 1- 2023, a lot of companies are failing to do that and facing huge penalties for example, Sephora paid $1.2 million for non-compliance towards data privacy.

6.  Have very well-focused strategies in place to boost employee engagement, software that shows the traits of a social HR like web.hr, have successfully incorporated all traits of modern elements to keep teams across the globe connected at a single platform.

7.  Dealing with quiet quitting in the most humane fashion ever, getting to the roots of this and eliminating the factors that lead to this kind of quitting, solving the grievances on both sides of the company, and bringing neutrality to the table.

8.  Find out the reasons for employee dis-engagement rather than focusing on hiring sprees, no matter how many employees you replace, if the problem hasn’t been solved at the core, the employer-employee distance would widen

9.  Find out the disparity between hard workers and those who slack and let others take the burden of their share. This leads to burnout of the efficient employees and hence results in the loss of the workforce that matters the most. Save, protect, and nourish the leaders at work and encourage others to be like them

10.  Be compliant with rules and regulations, along with safe working conditions, along with laws of cannabis at the workplace, how minimum wages vary from state to state. Be on top of the information funnels.

11.  Have a balance between work flexibility and integrity of the company, both need a fine balance

12.  Put forth company policy as straightforward as possible, whether employees work remotely, come in person, or have a hybrid mechanism in place. Avoid any legal implications and disruptions caused by the unions at work, for example, state clearly that there are regulations in place for employees relocating while working remotely and stick to them strictly

13. Be well aware of the cultural implications of hybrid work formats, before committing to any approach, have a consensus amongst the employees and employers, for the clarity of communication, and provide an opportunity to come up with answers to the questions that employers might have about hybrid work formats

14. Rethink employee retention efforts, and bring them up a notch by providing perks and social connectivity tools within the software. People like belonging to a tribe or like-minded individuals

15. Update all training protocols and manage efficiently a transition that requires to in-person work schedule from hybrid and remote working styles, which might be the biggest challenge starting the new year

If we sum up a whole lot of this, it comes down to the fact that the key to success lies in the ability to adapt to changes fast, incorporate the latest tech into HR, and being with a company that believes in this mantra all along, I can tell we have very huge potential of innovation in HR.

HR digitization and automation using AI will be huge in 2023 and companies like WebHR will be the pioneers of this change.

A customized approach would show beneficial results to achieve a targeted and strategic value for both HR departments and the organization itself, with these extremely volatile and uncertain work conditions looming over the entirety of industries across the globe, organizations need to close down on the skill gaps, to eliminate hurdles caused by lack of skill and instill measures that ensure learning and development habits that fix this culture by bringing on-board long term skill enhancing tools. Find a sweet spot that delivers on both employee experience and organizational needs and then stick to those principles.

This new year would bring light upon the grilling task of embracing technology as soon as possible because the industry dynamics are changing, and coping with them is more important now than ever. This could be tackled by more automation and innovation with human help at the core but relying on software for the completion of repetitive tasks.

2023 would be the year of automation, we must take this leap to avoid deadlocks in the industry caused by mass layoffs, this would be the sole reason the economies around the world could survive and flourish.