HR Predictions for 2024: The Global Search For Productivity2024年的HR预测强调了生产力和AI在商业和雇佣实践中的关键作用。这篇文章讨论了公司在动态的经济条件和不断变化的劳动力市场背景下，如何适应他们的人才管理和招聘策略。强调了员工赋权的增加，劳动力市场的变化，以及技能发展的重要性。文章还探讨了劳动力囤积、混合工作模式和员工激活等关键概念。此外，还涉及领导力挑战、薪酬公平、DEI计划，以及可能的四天工作周。
一起来看Josh Bersin 带来新得见解
For the last two decades I’ve written about HR predictions, but this year is different. I see a year of shattering paradigms, changing every role in business. Not only will AI change every company and every job, but companies will embark on a relentless search for productivity.
Think about where we have been. Following the 2008 financial crisis the world embarked on a zero-interest rate period of accelerating growth. Companies grew revenues, hired people, and watched their stock prices go up. Hiring continued at a fevered pace, leading to a record-breaking low unemployment rate of 3.5% at the end of 2019.
Along came the pandemic, and within six months everything ground to a halt. Unemployment shot up to 15% in April of 2020, companies sent people home, and we re-engineered our products, services, and economy to deal with remote work, hybrid work arrangements, and a focus on mental health.
Once the economy started up again (thanks to fiscal stimulus in the US), companies went back to the old cycle of hiring. But as interest rates rose and demand fell short we saw layoffs repeat, and over the last 18 months we’ve seen hiring, layoffs, and then hiring again to recover.
Why the seesaw effect?
CEOs and CFOs are operating in what we call the “Industrial Age” – hire to grow, then lay people off when things slow down.
Well today, as we enter 2024, all that is different. We have to “hoard our talent,” invest in productivity, and redevelop and redeploy people for growth.
We live in a world of 3.8% unemployment rate, labor shortages in almost every role, an increasingly empowered workforce, and a steady drumbeat of employee demands: demands for pay raises, flexibility, autonomy, and benefits. More than 20% of all US employees change jobs each year (2.3% per month), and almost half these changes are into new industries.
Why is this the “new normal?”
There are several reasons. First, as we discuss in our Global Workforce Intelligence research, industries are overlapping. Every company is a digital company; every company wants to build recurring revenue streams; and soon every company will run on AI. Careers that used to stay within an industry are morphing into “skills-based careers,” enabling people to jump around more easily than ever before.
Second, employees (particularly young ones) feel empowered to act as they wish. They may quietly quit, “work their wage,” or take time out to change careers. They see a long runway in their lives (people live much longer than they did in the 1970s and 1980s) so they don’t mind leaving your company to go elsewhere.
Third, the fertility rate continues to drop and labor shortages will increase. Japan, China, Germany, and the UK all have shrinking workforce populations. And in the next decade or so, most other developed economies will as well.
Fourth, labor unions are on the rise. Thanks to a new philosophy in Washington, we’ve seen labor activity at Google, Amazon, Starbucks, GM, Ford, Stellantis, Kaiser, Disney, Netflix, and others. While union participation is less than 11% of the US workforce, it’s much higher in Europe and this trend is up.
What does all this mean?
There are many implications.
First, companies will be even more focused on building a high-retention model for work (some call it “labor hoarding.”) This means improving pay equity, continuing hybrid work models, investing in human-centered leadership, and giving people opportunities for new careers inside the company. This is why talent marketplaces, skills-based development, and learning in the flow of work are so important.
Second, CEOs have to understand the needs, desires, and demands of workers. As the latest Edelman study shows, career growth now tops the list, along with the desire for empowerment, impact, and trust. A new theme we call “employee activation” is here: listening to the workforce and delegating decisions about their work to their managers, teams, and leaders.
Third, the traditional “hire to grow” model will not always work. In this post-industrial age we have to operate systemically, looking at internal development, job redesign, experience, and hiring together. This brings together the silo’d domains of recruiting, rewards and pay, learning & development, and org design. (Read our Systemic HR research for more.)
What does “business performance” really mean?
If you’re a CEO you want revenue growth, market share, profitability, and sustainability. If you can’t grow by hiring (and employees keep “activating” in odd ways), what choice do you have? It’s pretty simple: you automate and focus on productivity.
Why do I see this as the big topic in 2024? For three big reasons.
First, CEOs care about it.
The 2024 PwC CEO survey found that CEO’s believe 40% of the work in their company is wasted productivity.
As shocking as that sounds, it rings true to me: too many emails, too many meetings, messy hiring process, bureaucratic performance management, and more. (HR owns some of these problems.)
Second, AI enables it.
AI is designed to improve white-collar productivity. (Most automation in the past helped blue or gray collar workers.) Generative AI lets us find information more quickly, understand trends and outliers, train ourselves and learn, and clean up the mess of documents, workflows, portals, and back office compliance and administration systems we carry around like burdens.
Third, we’re going to need it.
How will you grow when it’s so hard to find people? Time to hire went up by almost 20% last year and the job market is getting even tougher. Can you compete with Google or OpenAI for tech skills?
Internal development, retooling, and automation projects are the answer. And with Generative AI, the opportunities are everywhere.
What does all this mean for HR?
Well as I describe in the HR Predictions, we have a lot of issues to address.
We have to accelerate our shift to a dynamic job and organization structure. We have to get focused and pragmatic about skills. We have to rethink “employee experience” and deal with what we call “employee activation.” And we are going to have to modernize our HR Tech, our recruiting, and our L&D systems to leverage AI and make these systems more useful.
Our HR teams will be AI-powered too. As our Galileo™ customers already tell us, a well-architected “expert assistant” can revolutionize how HR people work. We can become “full-stack” HR professionals, find data about our teams in seconds instead of weeks, and share HR, leadership, and management practices with line leaders in seconds. (Galileo is being used as a management coach in some of the world’s largest companies.)
There are some other changes as well. As the company gets focused on “growth through productivity,” we have to think about the 4-day week, how we institutionalize hybrid work, and how we connect and support remote workers in a far more effective way. We have to refocus on leadership development, spend more time and money on first line managers, and continue to invest in culture and inclusion. We have to simplify and rethink performance management, and we have to solve the vexing problem of pay-equity.
And there’s more.
DEI programs have to get embedded in the business (the days of the HR DEI Police are over). We have to clean up our employee data so our AI and talent intelligence systems are accurate and trustworthy. And we have to shift our thinking from “supporting the business” to “being a valued consultant” and productizing our HR offerings, as our Systemic HR research points out.
All this is detailed in our new 40-page report “HR Predictions for 2024,” launching this week, including a series of Action Plans to help you think through all these issues.
And let me remind you of a big idea. Productivity is why HR departments exist.
Everything we do, from hiring to coaching to development to org design, is only successful if it helps the company grow. As experts in turnover, engagement, skills, and leadership, we in HR have make people and the organization productive every day. 2024 is a year to focus on this higher mission.
One final thing: taking care of yourself.
The report has 15 detailed predictions, each with a series of action steps to consider. The last one is really for you: focus on the skills and leadership of HR. We, as stewards of the people-processes, have to focus on our own capabilities. 2024 will be a year to grow, learn, and work as a team. If we deal with these 15 issues well, we’ll help our companies thrive in the year ahead.
Details on the Josh Bersin Predictions
The predictions study is our most widely-read report each year. It includes a detailed summary of all our research and discusses fifteen essential issues for CEOs, CHROs, and HR professionals. It will be available in the following forms:
Webinar and launch on January 24: Register Here (replays will be available)
Infographic with details: Available on January 24.
Microlearning course on Predictions: Available on January 24.
Detailed Report and Action Guide: Available to Corporate Members and Josh Bersin Academy Members (JBA). (Note you can join the JBA for $495 per year and that includes our entire academy of tools, resources, certificate courses, and SuperClasses in HR.)
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2024年01月19日
workforce dynamics
Anita Lettink Challenges HR Norms: Adapting to the Unpredictable Work Landscape of 2024ANITA LETTINK：Why I'm not writing 2024 HR trends
Anita Lettink, in her newsletter, discusses why she is not writing the 2024 HR trends. She emphasizes the importance of a dynamic, continuous strategy over annual predictions in HR. The article reflects on the evolving nature of work and the need for a fluid, adaptable approach. Lettink argues that understanding and navigating HR challenges require responsiveness to rapid changes in technology, economics, and workforce dynamics. She introduces the 2024 HR challenge, encouraging HR professionals to maximize the use of their HR solutions and focus on making incremental changes to better support their workforce.
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Hey future of work friends,
I probably find you during budgeting and planning time. For me, it’s the end of conference season. I did my final keynote on the New Employee Experience at Indeed FutureWorks last week. And now I am back home, and will use December to read everything I bookmarked to surprise you with new keynotes and articles next year. I’ll also write my annual HR Tech Startup report.
And if you’d like an in-company webinar on what to expect from AI in HR or how to prepare for Equal Pay please reach out - I’ve got you covered!
Thinking about the Future of Work is important. And yes, you’d already assumed I would say that. I've spent years analyzing trends at the intersection of economics, business, technology, and human resources. Each year, I've distilled these insights into trend articles, aiming to forecast the year ahead. However, I've realized that our rapidly evolving world demands a different approach. In this newsletter, I'll share why I've moved away from annual trend predictions and why we need a more dynamic, continuous strategy in understanding and navigating HR challenges. I'll explore how embracing a fluid, responsive stance can better equip us to handle HR (tech) developments.
Why I am not writing 2024 HR trends
I've always been deeply invested in keeping a finger on the pulse of our industry. For years, it was a tradition of mine to sit down at the end of each year and write an article on emerging trends in Human Resources, based on my analysis of developments in economics, business, technology, and HR. I wrote them to reflect on the past year and help you - and me - prepare for the next.
I stopped this tradition. And if you wonder why, it's not for a lack of trends or changes in the industry—far from it. The HR landscape is as dynamic as ever, perhaps even more so. But I've realized that these annual trend articles, while insightful, may not be as beneficial as I once thought. Sure, they give a nice overview of what’s happening and what might happen, but you can’t run after every trend. And most years there were way too many of them.
The world of work is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and the tools and strategies that were groundbreaking a year ago might now be outdated. In this fast-paced environment, I believe that what we need isn't annual predictions but a continuous, adaptable approach to understanding and navigating HR challenges. When you want to provide a stable environment for employees and your company, thoughtful, strategic adjustments might be much more impactful.
So, instead of offering predictions, I'm taking a different path. I want to share with you the reasons behind this shift in my thinking and why I believe it's crucial for all of us in HR to adopt a more fluid, responsive stance towards industry trends.
Embracing a fluid approach
This change was sparked by several realizations. Firstly, the very nature of HR is fundamentally about people, and people are inherently unpredictable. People also like stability. And while trends can give us a broad outline, they can't capture the nuanced, often sudden shifts in employee needs, workplace dynamics, and organizational cultures. We all remember the start of the pandemic, when we put everything aside to make sure that employees could work safely, and where possible, from home. And while we might think this was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, we also know the world has become more unpredictable, and we should be ready to deal with similar sudden events.
And that means we should think more in terms of how we can offer a stable base that can handle these sudden shifts. That also means we should not be so quick in dividing work in “the past” and “the future”. While some people argue you should only look at the future of work, I believe we should take a much more nuanced approach.
As example, the picture above: it’s often used to show the past and the future of work. In my thinking, both sides represent the future. It’s not either/or, it’s and/and. And when I speak about the New Employee Experience, I use it to encourage HR professionals to cast a wide net: how can you offer all work options, so you appeal to a larger section of the workforce? It’s not about discarding the past and looking at the future. It’s embracing both where you can. Some people like the 9-5 day, working from an office. Some people find profit more important than purpose. It’s about offering a wide range of choices, to attract and retain people in a time when the labor market is tight. That’s especially important when you work in the Global North, and a next major shift is upon us: a shrinking workforce due to demographics in combination with the lack of skilled workers.
How useful are predictions anyway?
Secondly, I noticed a pattern over the years. Many of the trends I predicted would either rapidly evolve or be overtaken by entirely new developments before the year was out. Just look at Generative AI: at the end of last year, no one predicted that this would be the main topic of 2023. This rapid (r)evolution made me question the usefulness of annual predictions: why do we write them only at the end of the year? In a world where change is the only constant, static yearly forecasts seem almost counterintuitive. How can we even begin to predict what is coming, when recent events put everything we know upside down?
And lastly, I also started to wonder if focusing too heavily on future trends might pull us away from the present. When we always look ahead, we might miss crucial opportunities to address current issues effectively or fail to build on the strengths we already have. It can sometimes cause us to miss out on addressing the immediate needs and challenges facing our employees and organizations.
By constantly chasing what might be ahead or new, we risk not fully leveraging the strengths and successes we currently possess. It's vital to strike a balance between preparing for future changes and optimizing our current practices. This way, we can ensure that our efforts are not only geared towards what the 'future of work' might look like but are enhancing today’s HR strengths, thereby creating a more holistic and effective HR strategy.
2024 Challenge
And to illustrate the above with a practical example, let me ask you this: what percentage of your HR solution do you actually use? I am not asking for an exact number, just an estimated guess. When you look at its current functionality, do you use all of it? Half? Maybe even less?
When you close a contract for an HR cloud solution, the vendor will not only maintain the solution in its current state, but also improve it over time. And the fee you pay covers all those new features and functionalities. That means you get more bang for your buck. But if you don’t activate any of these features, then the vendor is wasting development capacity, and you are paying for something you will never see. Would you consider that good use?
And the problem isn't just the use; you will also miss out on the potential to support your workers better and change your workplace. Every unused feature in your HR solution is a lost chance to improve employee engagement, streamline processes, or uncover people insights.
So, here’s my 2024 HR challenge for you:
1. Guess: How much of your HR solution do you use today?
2. Pick one unused feature in your HR solution, explore it, and make it available!
Try to make a gradual change every month. Repeat that during the first six months of 2024 and then evaluate your success or learn from your mistakes! And don’t forget to tag me with the results! Instead of focusing on yet another 2024 HR trend, let’s make sure that we first use our HR solution to the fullest, one feature at a time. I think this will be more helpful to your organization than you might think.
Let’s continue the conversation
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that looking forward isn't important. On the contrary, it's crucial. If only for the reason that what we build today will affect our future workforce the most. But we should do it with the understanding that HR is less about predicting the future and more about creating it through proactive, ongoing engagement with our workforce, our company, and the world around us. To maybe not take giant leaps but make incremental changes that benefit the people we work with most. People are tired of constant change. However, we can draw inspiration from social media tools - by implementing small, gradual improvements, we can consistently enhance the experience, allowing people to smoothly adapt to these changes over time.
This shift is not just about how we talk about HR trends; it's about how we do HR. It's a move towards a more dynamic, responsive, and collaborative approach that recognizes the complexity and fluidity of our work. It's about creating a living dialogue that evolves with our ever-changing environment.
We must talk about the future. But it shouldn’t be confined to the end of the year. There is no reason for such a hard cut. I look forward to engaging with you, in continuous conversations about what we're seeing, doing, and expecting in real-time. This approach, I believe, will not only keep us more connected to the immediate needs of our organizations but also better prepared to adapt to whatever the future holds.
While I don’t write HR trend articles anymore, my commitment to helping you understand and make sense of the future of work is as strong as ever. I will keep you posted on the latest developments as I see them. I will continue to write this newsletter about my observations on how we can improve work with the help of technology, especially new tech.
Good luck with planning the year ahead. And let me know if you would have preferred a list of 2024 HR trends,
Have a great day, Anita
What’s next for compensation?
Pete Tiliakos, Anke Mogannam and I participated in an online #WDAYChats. We shared insights and POV’s on modern payroll operations and how payroll leaders can help their organizations minimize cost and accelerate innovation.
Decusoft asked me how companies can prepare for pay transparency and equal pay. You can find my answers here.
Indeed asked people if money really makes them happy. Find the surprising answers, an interview with yours tryly and more compensation charts in this insightful Dutch report: De toekomst van compensatie.
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