HR has been constantly evolving since it entered the business landscape in the beginning of the 20^th century. In the beginning of its corporate journey, HR departments were only focused on recruiting and selection. As time went by, departments adopted many new roles including training, discipline, health and safety, wage policies, etc. HR is still changing and every year HR departments need to cope with the new challenges and tasks. In this article, we tried to summarize previous HR changes and predict how work in this field will look like in 2017.

Employee and Candidate Experience Improvement

Due to the large freelance market growth, corporate workplaces will continue to offer more leverage to regular employees. In 2015, a lot of corporate employees were on the brink of starting their own company or becoming freelancers. In order to keep their best talents loyal, employers will need to improve their working experience. The same trend will enable the chosen candidates to receive much better benefits and employment conditions.

Since in the last couple of years most HR experts were focused on finding the best possible talents, they will need to dig deeper into advertising and marketing tactics. Companies have always created ads for their customers and prospects, but now the niche-specific experts will become equally important. For example, several major tech companies, like Google and Facebook are trying to advertise themselves as great employers, by offering competitive employee benefits (paternal leave, insurance, great choice of food in the cafeteria) and increasing their office comfort.

Blended workforce and the gig economy

Rise of freelancing is one of the biggest employment trends in the last few years and it will drastically impact current employee politics. In 2017, we will see teams consisted of freelance and regular employees. They will work side-by-side and communicate through collaboration apps. Unions predict that more than 40% of workers will become freelancers in the next couple of years. For this reason, the future HR professionals and project managers will need to acquire new skills they will use for managing their diverse teams.

Annual Performance Reviews are Out

Millennials and Generation Z employees are inpatient and they are used to real-time gratifications they regularly receive on social networks. They do not have the time to wait for a whole year to receive the boss’ praises, complaints, bonus or a promotion. In 2017, employees will start receiving their performance feedback on a monthly, weekly, and a daily basis. This way they will be able to adjust their work to the new trends and expectations. This will also benefit the employers and HR professionals who will be able to closely coordinate their expectations with the market trends.

New Tech

Virtual and augmented reality will drastically improve employee training. New generations of employees are already using this tech at home. Although these futuristic gadgets seem expensive, they will actually lower the price of employee training, because training participants will require less expert help.

In addition to the new training technologies, the companies that still have not adopted the new flexible working trends will have much better control of their employees through the use of various apps and software. In recent years, we have witnessed the fast development of timetable creators and employee monitoring systems. These types of tools will become more prominent in large corporate enterprises.

Organizations will primarily focus on team performance

In spite of the unstoppable rise of freelancing and the gig economy, companies will shift their attention from individual performance evaluation to the evaluation of teamwork. Since we all have different career agendas, we will need to try hard to motivate the other team members to improve their performance, so the whole team can win more praises. Corporate business was always a team sport and now when younger generations are fully prepared for team work, employers can use that to impose new rules and turn their workforce into a well-prepared and organized business army.

Human resources departments are constantly changing. Fortunately, with every new year their focus is shifting more towards employee expectations and well-being. Digital revolution is constantly improving work conditions and adding more flexibility to corporate jobs and in the future, we can expect more flexible working schedules and more casual offices.

---

Oscar is a writer from Sydney and one of the editors at Bizzmarkblog. He enjoys conducting research in the vast fields of business and marketing and writing about the useful insights from the ever changing markets. Follow Oscar on Twitter.to stay updated with his latest posts.