4 HR Trends to Look Out for in 2017

2017 is finally here and HR professionals across the world are devising their talent management strategy for the year. No doubt, like previous years, talent management and talent retention will top the priority list of every HR professional. However, there are some more HR trends that are gaining ground and will gain momentum in the coming years.

Let’s look at these HR trends that will gain full pace in 2017 and beyond.

1. Growing requirements for various data and analytics tools: The ability to gather, process, and then analyze “Big Data” is gaining prominence when it comes to identifying as well as addressing different challenges of business life cycles. To gain a competitive edge in today’s ever-changing business landscape, companies should and must make use of analytics. It will assist them in getting various data-driven insights into their workforce trends and taking initiatives to refine various initiatives pertaining to recruitment, compensation, and performance. It will ultimately help them cater to rapidly evolving interest and goals of their employees.
2. Employee engagement gains priority: Increasingly, companies are laying more emphasis on enhancing their employee engagement to ensure better performance. A Gallup research has recently revealed that there is a strong connection between employee engagement and business outcomes. Therefore, whether you accept it or not, employee engagement is proportionally connected to an organization’s financial success, comprising profitability, productivity, and customer engagement. Engaged employees go a long way in contributing to a company’s growth, innovation, and revenue. According an ADP study, mid-size businesses having 151-999 employees presented three talent-centric reasons for their decelerating growth. These include the inability to draw the right talent (18 percent), unengaged employees (23 percent), and the incapability to retain the prime talent (17 percent).
3. Requirements for integrated systems for workforce management: Data is an important aspect of human resource management. However, pulling up the required data from various systems can pose a serious challenge to the HR department and the company alike. Therefore, most of the organizations—across the world—are mulling over the implementation of an integrated solution related to human capital management. Given this, it is expected that requirements and demand for various integrated systems pertaining to workforce management will gain manifold in 2017 and the years to come.
4. Millennials’ entry: The coming time will see the rising wave of retiring baby boomers and a growing number of entry of millennial to the workforce. As revealed by a PwC research, millennials are projected to account for about half of the global workforce by 2020. In many organizations, they are already accounting for a majority of the workforce. Organizations aspiring to draw and retain the fresh talent will require to hire this new-age digitally savvy workforce and make sure that their journey through recruitment and onboarding is backed up by various mobile as well as social platforms.

2017 is projected to be a watershed year for the HR and talent management professionals. With the ever-evolving transformation in the new-age talent management world, devising talent management strategy and ensuring talent retention are no longer the ‘only’ challenges to the talent department. Talent management professionals are all set to address a rising number of issues. Is your talent management strategy ready to rise to such unforeseen challenges?