How Do Changes In The Labor Force Affect Human Resource Practices

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The world of work has changed dramatically in the by decade, shaped by factors that include a brutal recession, technological advances and a new generation of workers with very dissimilar ideas of what employment should look similar.

Ten years ago, companies surveyed by the SHRM Foundation said their top future challenges were succession planning and providing leaders with the skills needed to be successful. Today, employers say the increasing competition for skilled workers is a top concern. As a result, the workplace is much more employee-focused and individualized. That's pushing employers to, among other things, provide flexible schedules to people with family obligations or give tuition help to entry-level workers so that they tin can become a new job — somewhere else.

"I would say [Hour is] moving from processing paper to making sure individuals feel valued in the organization," says Kate Bischoff, SHRM-SCP, an employment attorney at tHRive Law & Consulting LLC, which is based in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The work is "much more personalized than it has e'er been before."

The trend toward an employee-tailored workplace is likely to continue, and you may need to adjust quickly if you haven't already started. "We're going to now run into this shift to employee value, and this is critical. It's the deficit we see today in Hour," says Rusty Lindquist, vice president of human capital direction strategy and intellectual property at Hour software company BambooHR, which is based almost Salt Lake City. Hr's traditional accent on payroll, benefits and procedures will need to broaden. "The HR of the next decade has to exist more than focused on performance and productivity. And that's going to crave a seismic shift in thinking."

So what has changed over the past decade, and how will those trends evolve in the years to come?

ane. Companies Go Social

 So: Ten years ago, social media was adequately new and a trivial unsettling for business leaders and HR. Twitter was just 1 year sometime, and Facebook was thought of mainly as a distraction that threatened to decrease productivity. 2-thirds of employers used technology to cake connections to banned websites in 2006, 3 out of 4 monitored which websites workers visited and more than half monitored employees' east-mails, co-ordinate to a BambooHR written report of HR trends.

NOW: A more relaxed mental attitude prevails. Last year, merely 30 percent of organizations blocked admission to certain sites and even fewer kept an eye on what workers were viewing and eastward-mailing, co-ordinate to BambooHR.

Of course, company leaders fully sympathise that social media can exist distracting—and will continue to be for equally long as there are cute cat videos to share—but they also realize that trying to control employees' online lives at work is likely futile and maybe fifty-fifty counterproductive. Social media is "how people are used to finding data and communicating. If you limit it likewise much, it's going to stifle them," says Donatella Verrico, chief homo resource officer at law firm Lowenstein Sandler in Roseland, N.J.

WHAT'South Next: In the next decade, companies may well abandon electronic mail and use social media or other instant messaging tools as their primary internal communication vehicle, predicts Shawn Casemore, president of Ontario, Canada-based management consulting business firm Casemore and Co. Inc.

ii. Benefits Go a la Menu

THEN: Wellness and retirement programs were among the most common benefits employers provided, and do good offerings were relatively limited.

NOW: Employees however value the basics, but they too desire more flexible and individualized benefits. Companies have responded past recalibrating their perks to remain competitive in the state of war for talent. Retail giant Amazon, for case, offers its hourly employees a generous tuition benefit and onsite schooling. The startling detail? The company trains workers for jobs outside of Amazon.

The Career Pick plan offers up to 95 pct reimbursement of tuition and fees (up to $12,000 over four years) to train employees in high-demand fields in regions where they work. They can learn about aircraft mechanics, machine tool technologies and nursing, for case.

"Being able to annunciate such a programme helps with recruiting," says Juan Garcia, Amazon'due south global leader for associate career development. And internal studies prove that participants have 1-fourth the attrition charge per unit of nonparticipants. About x,000 people take taken reward of the benefit.

Educatee loan aid is another popular perk with modern workers. "Years ago, the employee entered the workforce wanting to know right from the beginning, 'What is my retirement programme?' The entry-level employee is now burdened with educational debt that didn't exist previously, and they're asking, 'What kind of benefits can you provide for pupil debt?' " says Skip Spriggs, senior executive vice president and principal homo resources officer at TIAA, a New York City-based financial services company.

WHAT'S NEXT: More companies may embrace a benefits model like to the arroyo behind consumer-driven health plans: Employees are allocated a fix amount that they tin can spend on the perks that best come across their needs. That'southward the management LinkedIn went in after it offered a generous paid-parental-leave policy—and heard from employees without children. "We got quick feedback: 'This isn't fair. If I don't have kids, what will you do for me?' " says Pat Wadors, the company's senior vice president of global talent organization. And then in 2015, the business piloted Perk Upwards, a benefit that provides up to $500 a quarter for workers to spend on lifestyle perks such every bit massages, a personal trainer or a professional dog-walker.

three. Feedback Becomes Fluid

THEN: Companies relied heavily on almanac reviews to assess employees' performance and provide feedback—and some used callous strategies that pitted workers confronting one another. At Microsoft, for instance, managers relied on stacked ranking, or the "rank and yank" fashion of employee cess, in which the employees with the lowest ratings tended to terminate up looking for other opportunities in the company—or elsewhere.

Now: Companies are adopting a less formal and more flexible approach. Afterward Microsoft moved away from stacked ranking in 2013, managers began using a procedure called Connects, in which workers go existent-time feedback without structured reviews. Instead of numbered rankings, it's about the employees' impact over the terminal two to 3 months, their predictable future bear on, what they learned from diverse experiences and how they grew professionally, says Chuck Edward, caput of global talent acquisition at Microsoft, which employs 110,000 people worldwide. And instead of encouraging competition amidst colleagues, the system fosters collaboration. Employees are assessed on how they worked with their teams and contributed to others' success. That's a welcome approach, specially among Millennial workers. Nearly half-dozen out of 10 said they have been upset by a performance review, and well-nigh prefer ongoing conversations about their performance, co-ordinate to a study past Hr outsourcing company TriNet.

85% of Millennials would feel more confident in their current position if they had more-frequent operation conversations with their managers.

WHAT'Due south NEXT: No 1 is sure. While experts believe that the move away from a once-a-year gathering of feedback is a pace in the correct direction, nailing down the best process for evaluating employees in a way that benefits both company and worker remains elusive. "10 years ago, I told people if I could find a adept appraisal system, I'd be rich," says Pamela Harding, SHRM-SCP, CEO of Enumclaw, Wash.-based Metzano, which operates the LinkedIn grouping Linked:Hr. "Ten years after, it still doesn't exist."

iv. Engineering science Moves Piece of work Beyond the Office

Then: People were starting to take advantage of digital technology to work remotely and outside of traditional concern hours, but employers that offered telework options were still the exception rather than the dominion.

NOW: A Lodge for Human Resources Direction study showed that three times as many companies offered telework last twelvemonth than did in 1996. That gives elbowroom to both workers and employers, who can vastly expand their pool of task candidates. "It doesn't have to be someone local for a job," Harding says. Companies "can piece of work with someone across the world."

Flexible piece of work arrangements and schedules accept also brought about a different way to evaluate work. Long hours and face fourth dimension used to exist mandatory at some companies. At present, information technology's non then much about time served but rather about what gets done. "It goes right back to getting your work judged past getting the job completed," Harding says.

WHAT'South Adjacent: The age-quondam trouble with new applied science, though, is that the homo chemical element frequently gets lost. In the next decade, it will be upwardly to Hour managers to instruct workers on how to communicate exterior of due east-postal service and social media. "We have to teach them how to shake hands, how to network outside of a computer," Verrico says.

[SHRM members-only online discussion platform: SHRM Connect ]

5. Career Development Is Agile and Gig-Focused

THEN: In 2005, almost 10 percent of U.Southward. workers were employed past a temporary help agency, as an independent contractor or in an on-call position, according to a study from Harvard University's Lawrence Katz and Princeton University's Alan Krueger.

NOW: Good day, company career ladder. How-do-you-do, gig economy. In the U.South., slightly more than 1 out of 4 workers were gig workers in 2016, co-ordinate to the McKinsey Global Institute, and that number continues to abound as people seek more independence and opportunities. (Past contrast, the decade before that showed piffling change in the percentage of workers in alternative piece of work arrangements.) The growing Millennial workforce is more focused on racking up new experiences than on banking time at 1 organization (or fifty-fifty in one field for an entire career), and 60 minutes managers are adapting.

"Years agone, the old paradigm was that the contract was divers around loyalty and tenure. At that place is a new social contract, or new business image, in which employees, peculiarly Millennials, are less incentivized by security and benefits and more than eager to take on roles that offer new experiences and flexibility," says Jan Bruce, co-founder and CEO of meQuilibrium, a Boston-based visitor that helps organizations deal with worker stress. "Instead of buying your loyalty with tenure, we earn it by helping you be agile and purposeful. I can't purchase you for life, but if I give you a great skill and help you in your career, then you volition be loyal to me while you are there."

That includes offer more opportunities to entrepreneurial contained contractors—contingent workers who work on a per-project basis and are not employees of whatever ane company.

WHAT'S NEXT: The gig economy—driven as much past the economical downturn of 2008-09 every bit past the influx of Millennials in the workforce—volition present challenges in the next decade for 60 minutes, including whether and how to provide benefits to contractors and manage intellectual property rights when a person has several different employers, Wadors says. But ultimately, workers and companies will benefit from the trend. "If we go more than agile in [talking to] the workforce and listening to their choices, we tin create more flexibility and save money" by streamlining staffing, she says.

6. Analytics Alter the Game—Slowly

THEN: Some HR managers were experimenting with using metrics to measure the cost and impact of workforce programs and HR initiatives, simply few HR professionals had whatever groundwork in data analysis.

Now: Although there's growing recognition of the need for HR practitioners with expertise in information skills, the number of organizations really leveraging workforce information is still relatively depression. According to a 2015 report by Deloitte, less than 9 percent of respondents said their organizations had a strong team in place that could handle information analysis within 60 minutes.

32% of companies say they are ready to begin using predictive analytics.

WHAT'S NEXT: While analytics have gotten off to a sluggish start, the use of data to assess and improve everything from recruitment to wellness and safety to succession strategies volition exist the hottest and biggest game-changing trend in Hr. In fact, nearly ane-3rd of companies said they were ready to make the leap to using total, predictive analytics, according to the Deloitte written report. "It's going to impact everything—what makes the all-time team, who are the best [job] candidates and who is at risk in the organization," Bischoff says. "We're going to encounter it explode in the next few years."

Predictive analytics volition have metrics to a new level past pinpointing whether task candidates share the aforementioned characteristics as an organisation'due south best-performing employees. Data will also exist used to promote wellness past identifying behaviors that lead to higher illness rates or by determining which parts of the company have the all-time and worst accident rates.

"The … bogus intelligence backside the analytics is going to get more and more souped upwardly, more advanced," Edward says. Merely "the man element of needing to discern what matters and why—that isn't going away."

Susan Milligan is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

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