This time of year, everyone puts out their “What to expect in 2020” lists. No matter the industry you’re in, you’ve got pundits predicting trends for the year ahead. HR is no exception.
For our camp, and let’s be honest, for everyone else who works for a living, it’s about technology, and how its rapid-fire evolution is going to shape the future of work. For HR, it means getting ahead of the curve, envisioning the skills, both hard and soft, that are going to be required to take your company into the future, and hiring based on those skills rather than simply by pedigree.
LinkedIn agrees, saying the soft skills that will be most in demand in the coming decade are things like creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. In other words, things the bots can’t do.
Is it time to scale the monumental mountain of examining each job function in your company, breaking down the job functions within each role, looking at the specific skills it takes to do the job at a stellar level (talking to top performers in each role is a good way to do this), and deciding which of those functions might be replaced by automation a few years down the line (or tomorrow)? Yeah, it might be time for that.
One prediction for a 2020 trend that caught our collective eye here at GetFive was the prediction of continued shakeups in the C-suite.
It’s #MeToo’s continuing tidal wave, for certain. But CEOs leave for a variety of reasons, and replacing them is no easy task.
One thing the pundits aren’t mentioning, but we see clearly, is the general feeling that business as usual, as it has been for decades, just isn’t good enough anymore. Employees are revolting in places like Google in opposition to actions, policies, and clients that don’t fit with employee values. If a businessperson 30 years ago were to have been given a crystal ball to see what’s happening now, they’d say it was like the tail wagging the dog. Employees deciding how a company acts based on their values? Sacre bleu! But it’s happening, and changing workplaces for the better.
All of it boils down to the fact that the coming decade is going to be a busy one for HR. We’ll be here every step of the way.
