What does the future of HR look like?

HR departments are becoming increasingly important in maintaining a healthy company culture. In what ways should HR change in order to meet new demands?

HR has always been a vital organ to the inner workings of a company. But as times have changed, so must HR departments change with it. HR professionals must become more business-attuned and the employee should be their central enabler. But how can these departments change when their administrative and transactional workloads take up most of their time? And how can they encourage people to become their own entrepreneurs in an innovative environment when their task has always been to limit risk as much as possible? 

Understanding the problem

On the one hand, businesses feel like HR departments are currently detached from business realities. They mostly interact with employees when recruiting people or when rectifying payroll issues and handling employee complaints. They also use separate tools to manage HR processes, while businesses are increasingly working centralized. On the other hand, there seems to be a lack of transparency on part of HR departments, and this negatively affects employee impressions of HR, which affects the way the company is viewed as well.

Employee experience and satisfaction are central to HR

HR professionals need to change their approach from company first to employee first. Keeping employees motivated and working on their talents requires a proactive approach, which means employee experience should be the absolute focal point of HR.

In many ways, employees function as customers do. Hence, HR departments can learn much from marketing departments. In marketing, Salesforce Research shows that over 84% of customers want to be treated like a person and not a means to an end. Therefore, it is not hard to imagine that this applies in some measure to employees as well.

As employee experience is the new focal point of HR departments, it can be relevant to have employees fill in a customer satisfaction survey on the HR department. This can help HR to be more employee centric, while also improve employee satisfaction and retention.