If the past three years have taught us anything, it’s that we in the HR industry need to remain agile. We’ll need to be able to adapt to sudden and drastic shifts in the workplace. And to do so, we’ll need to have employees who are resilient and diverse in their abilities. We’ll also need malleable and powerful technologies to make our old processes faster and more reliable. Most importantly, we’ll need employees who are happy and feel like they belong in your organisation, preferably alongside the powerful technologies that make their work more efficient. It may not even be a week into the new year, but we’re already ready to talk about our predictions for HR trends in 2023.
Are you ready to dive in, too?
Our Predictions for HR Trends in 2023
Of course, there is no way to know for sure the following will happen. After all, who among us could have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic, The Great Resignation of 2021, and the Quiet Quitting trend of 2022? But after surveying experts in the field, we’ve accumulated some predictions for what you can expect for the HR world in the coming year.
1. The End of Burnout and Quiet Quitting
Our first prediction is that many will be working to reduce or even prevent employee burnout. This, in addition to other efforts, will also help prevent quiet quitting, as well. After all, the former almost always leads to the latter. Naturally, then, encouraging healthy and engaging behaviour in your employees starts with making sure they’re not burnt out.
Of course, this may also require increasing their wages, especially since inflation is increasingly becoming difficult to keep up with. Nevertheless, we anticipate many employers and HR professionals doing so to ensure their employees are happy and healthy so as to want and be able to stay at their job.
So, what if an increase in wages is not realistic, considering we may soon face an economic recession? Or even worse: what if an increase in pay is not sufficient to keep your employees happy and engaged in their work? Many HR professionals are starting to implement the following to further encourage healthy, pro-active engagement with their employees:
- Gamification of goals and training sessions
- Investment in mental health and other physical health benefits (including gym membership discounts, workshops, etc.)
- More consistent and clear communication
In addition, many HR professionals are planning to implement more flexibility into their workplace by offering employees either (and sometimes both) hybrid or entirely work-from-home circumstances or even four-day work weeks. And these are crucial not only for the health of the employee–they’re also crucial for ensuring your workplace continues to be adaptable.
“HR’s role has become larger, more important, and more challenging than ever.” – McLean & Company, 2023
2. Hiring for a Diverse Team with Packfinder
Diversity in the workplace should always be a given to constantly strive toward. But not all hiring for diversity practices are equal. In order to hire for diversity fairly, your hiring practices need to go further than just the candidate’s identity. It needs to filter solely for a candidate’s abilities and do so blindly.
We at Workwolf for example use blockchain technology to, among other tasks, filter our own candidates based on their free online soft skills assessment results. And we’re not just looking for the same kind of worker every time we hire. We look for diverse teams who have different abilities and strengths so that we create complementary and supplemental teams. We think this is a spot-on means of filtering candidates fairly because it does so blindly (as in, with no information about the individual other than their personality and behaviour), and is a free test that is accessible and easy to use.
That is, diversity in hiring doesn’t just mean hiring workers whose racial backgrounds differ from one another. It means also opening up your hiring to those who might not have been financially able to attend post-secondary schools.
Diversity may also look like hiring someone with a different way of thinking about a common problem in your industry, or may have different strengths than you’re used to hiring for. But these very unique strengths are what makes a team strong in its diverse population. It also makes the team more likely to be adaptable in times of crises (like a global pandemic, for example)!
This brings us to our final prediction for HR trends in 2023: technological advancements and usages.
3. Fresh Tech and Usages in Hiring and Managing Teams
Just as Zoom or Microsoft Teams became a crucial tool for keeping companies in touch throughout lockdowns across the world, new technologies are becoming increasingly more important for succeeding in a “post-COVID” workplace.
In an article for LinkedIn, Bernard Marr says that many plan to implement more technologies that aim to monitor their employees when working both from home and in the office. Nevertheless, Marr makes clear that employers ought to only use employee tracking software to “ensure they are following healthy practices like taking breaks and regularly getting up to move around” (2022).
Virtual settings may also begin to gain more traction as versions of the “Metaverse” begin to evolve. We might see more online meetings turn virtual for a more smooth, integrated meeting setting, for example.
Lastly, and perhaps most crucially, many are beginning to adopt new systems for improving data security. For your organization, this may mean implementing a security platforms or other forms of software that ensure client and employee data remains private and confidential.
We use blockchain, for one example, to ensure all of our candidates’ pre-verified credentials remain secure and unchanged so that employers can fairly and consensually consider their resume details. (Intrigued? Find out more about our Digital Work Passports here!)
Your Predictions for HR Trends
Have any predictions of your own for HR trends in 2023? Leave a comment on our LinkedIn post here and get the discussion going there!
Not quite sure how you see your own hiring practices moving forward this year? Why not let us help you out? Sign up for a free Workwolf business account today to start sharing Packfinder assessments with your candidates and filter fairly and equitably all throughout 2023.
