The year 2020 has thrown in numerous surprises to the business community and workforce all over the world. With the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, companies all over the world are beginning to realize and embrace “The New Normal”. The shift in employee policies, guidelines, and daily operations is more evident than before, as the world is preparing to evolve, in the wake of the ongoing challenge that we face.

With this changing paradigm, the need for change in HR policies is also evident, as companies shift to accommodating more and more employees in remote workplace environments, and parallel focusing on ensuring and improving collaboration across geographies to ensure business continuity and success.

We have also listed easy ways to negotiate salary with the HR Manager.

Here we will look at the top HR trends for 2022 that are gaining more focus in the current environment. 

1. Employee Experience In “The New Norm

With increasing competition among companies to ensure a great workplace environment, and become a brand preferred by job seekers across the world, employee experience is paramount today. This is a notable shift from employee engagement, which was the major focus in the last decade or so. In the new normal, it is not just employee engagement but also employee care that needs focus.

2. Effective Collaboration While Working From Home

With the rapidly changing scenario in 2020, online tools and platforms are becoming the need of the day to run businesses. Teams App, Zoom and Google Meets are the new normal in every company that is ensuring business continuity and collaboration among team members located in different geographies, near and far.

3. Leveraging AI & People Analytics In “The New Normal”

Companies that leverage employee and job seekers’ data for effective decision-making are certainly achieving more success in terms of employee retention, managing attrition, and becoming a great place to work. With the Covid pandemic affecting the world, talent acquisition and hiring has entered a new phase with more online interviews than offline screening. Hence leveraging data to identify the best talent for the job at hand is key to success.

4. Virtual Reality To Drive Onboarding And Induction Programs

Employee on-boarding and induction programs have usually taken up for new joiners also see a rapid change in the current scenario. Virtual tours, vision, and mission sharing from CXOs and senior management, an overview of guidelines, and policies are all moving online.

5. Talent Acquisition In “The New Normal”

Here the shift is from offline screening towards online interview and screening setup. This is where it is vital to leverage the use of online collaboration tools and uninterrupted video calls to ensure face-to-face interaction and connectivity. With continuing work from home setup, the shift will also come up with hiring employees across geographies and not specific to a particular location or country.

6. Focus On Career Grow

With a remote work setup, there is a high possibility that employees feel left out and experience monotonous ways of working with no personal and professional progress. To avoid this, career growth plans and learning programs need to be looked into and designed to ensure better employee engagement and experience.

7. Ensuring Productivity In “The New Normal”

Data analytics tools and people analytics setup will play an important role in ensuring productivity in the current setup. As more and more companies are becoming vocal and turning evangelists to work from home policy, devising strategies to ensure productivity of your employees is the need of the hour. Analytics tools exist in the market today that reads the activities in the background of an employee’s laptop or desktop, and provides a daily and weekly report of the time allocation for each activity or on each application used.

8.Grievance Redressal & Case Management

Be it a complaint, a suggestion, a query, a formal procedure, providing these avenues even in a remote working environment is important. Also the ease of use and access to such a platform should also be looked at. Companies are turning towards setting up a toll free number for their employees to share their grievances, concerns and also to consult a health or finance advisor to plan their personal activities as well.

9.Employee Benefits In “The New Normal”

When in office, the use of office stationery, coffee machine, tissues, desk are all adding up to your overhead cost of operations. While these were benefits of working at the office, when working from home, the employee benefits need to be repackaged. Furniture allowance to setup home office, internet allowance, telephone allowance, enhancing the health insurance benefits are some of the areas to be looked at on priority.

10.Rewards & Recognition