You may be asking yourself how you can stay ahead of the game with the many challenges that are coming at HR professionals today. But what are the biggest challenges HR professionals face today?

As the workforce evolves, HR professionals need to change how they hire and engage with candidates. The methods used for hiring candidates 20 years ago won’t work nowadays. Standards have changed, and the new normal has done so as well.

Remote work has become popular recently, and this means HR professionals will need to spend more time at their desks than meeting people in real life. In this article, we offer you some top tips on how you can deal with these new HR challenges.

Tips on how to deal with today’s HR challenges

Remote work

If we talk about challenges, we have to mention remote work and some of its challenges. Remote work isn’t going anywhere, and the main factor behind its huge rise was the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

The rise of remote work brings both problems and potential solutions. However, according to a poll last year, 73% of respondents claimed that they prefer remote work. Moreover, remote work increases virtual collaboration and helps employees develop stronger relationships, directly affecting how they perform.

These statistics have encouraged HR professionals to rethink how they work and adapt to remote practices. Thus, they are adapting to helping employees and hiring new candidates virtually. After all, if your company doesn’t like innovation, how will it attract top talent?

Competition levels

With the digital age ever increasing, competition levels have become higher than ever. Why is that? Well, due to the low barrier to entry in the online world, anyone with an idea and the necessary financial resources can start a business and hire employees. However, many HR teams who fail to address talent needs may fall behind their competition.

HR teams can be categorized into three different types:

• Anticipators: predict future talent gaps that fit business goals and objectives 
• Reactors: responds to business requirements 
• Partners: collaborate with higher powers to work toward business goals 

Even though all three types are important, your HR team should aim to be anticipators. According to a study last year, only 10% of organizations are anticipators. Sadly, this figure has dropped significantly over the years, decreasing from 40% in 2018. This drop is mainly the result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced organizations to focus more on health issues than on the anticipator role.

Use performance reviews

Performance reviews are an excellent way to measure employee performance based on their competencies and key skills. They are used as a roadmap for professional growth and allow an HR team to track employee development over time. Additionally, you can understand any skills gaps to improve team composition, allocate training budgets, and create better hiring plans.

However, in order to do this, you need software for performance reviews that allows you to create review templates and timelines. Such HR software uses employee data to create review cycles and periodic reviews. Reminders and invitations ensure that participants complete all their reviews. Here are some software packages you could consider using to undertake reviews:

• Leapsome: includes many templates and timelines. Simple and easy interface to use

• Trakstar: gives personalized performance and provides real-time insights

• Synergita: provides one of the best continuous performance management OKR solutions for building high-performing teams and encourages employee engagement

• BamboorHR: provides full-service HR management

• Small Improvements: encourages employee development with pulse surveys

• AssessTEAM: excellent for performance management and productivity analysis

• Lattice: ideal for gaining insights on growth plans with employee development

Software programs such as these help HR departments better understand what kind of career support they can provide for employees, especially for companies looking to stay ahead of their competition. This means that the HR team should continuously monitor employee performance and ensure employees develop professionally through opportunities and training.

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Upskilling and reskilling

The need to continuously train doesn’t ever stop, which makes reskilling a vital part of the HR world. However, even when many companies use this route, they choose to use outdated methods to do so. The best way is to use more modern methods and find ways to increase transparency, flexibility, and communication with your staff members.

Upskilling, on the other hand, is training a person in their current role and preparing them to progress in their job. It might involve promoting them to a new position and allowing an employee to take on new responsibilities. Not every HR department is good at upskilling, and this is where you can see upskilling as either a challenge or opportunity.

Employee well-being

Employee well-being is no longer a benefit but is now considered an essential HR practice to support employees in every aspect of their personal and professional lives. Employee well-being includes many factors, including emotional, social, financial, and current state at their job.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, employee well-being has been an enormous concern. HR managers who do not think that employee well-being is important should. HP is an excellent example of this. They released an HP spirit program which provides their employees with well-being and health apps, homeschooling education resources, employee resource groups, and more.

Two years have passed, and the pandemic is still around, so employee well-being is still a significant concern. Thus, the shift in employee well-being has encouraged organizations to expand their employee benefits to enhance their employees' family life and individual experiences.

Leadership

In the United States alone, more than 47 million people quit their jobs in 2021. This has resulted in work shortages, and the leading causes are retirement, reconsideration, relocation, and the fact that many had to return to the office while not wanting to do so.

With the expansion of remote work and people feeling more comfortable working from home, employers who asked their employees to return to the office may have made a big mistake since this was a significant factor behind people leaving their jobs. But, of course, since there has been a rise in remote work, people have more opportunities than ever before, and this may determine whether they decide to change jobs or not.

Nobody will stay long in a job where there is poor leadership not in their favor. Unfortunately, this is a major issue for an HR team that fails to hire good leaders. According to recent statistics from Microsoft, 41% of employees are considering leaving their job next year.

One way to solve this problem is to re-negotiate with employees on what can be done better. Moreover, here are a few things HR leaders can do to manage their teams:

• Delegation: ensuring that the team can handle workloads provided to them.

• Virtual leading: since you are communicating virtually and don’t have any way to gauge emotions and facial expressions, virtual leadership requires managers to make more effort to build better relationships with hybrid and remote teams.

• Retaining leaders: while turnover is much lower for leaders than employees, statistics still show a 55% higher turnover rate. Talent hired externally poses a higher risk than talent hired internally.

However, this doesn’t mean that external hires are a terrible choice. You can use the following methods to overcome external hiring challenges:

• Use assessments to identify strengths and weaknesses
• Review development plans with leaders and managers
• Support your leaders with learning tools

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Wrapping up

These are our top tips on dealing with HR challenges this year. But, of course, we never know what may happen tomorrow, so it’s always important to be flexible and transparent in HR.

The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic changed many things and encouraged HR teams to shift their working habits and how they approach new challenges. While never know what may happen in the future, the pandemic utterly changed how we work.

We live in the era of the great resignation, and we can agree that remote work is here to stay. However, if we don’t adapt to these new changes and help our teams do their best, we will never succeed in overcoming these challenges. It’s the only way your team can grow and, when your team grows, it means your company does as well. After all, we’re all in this together!

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