Future of Human Resources Management

The future of Human Resources is backed by the advanced technology and the return of the human approach to our management practices. The small and nimble start-up companies show the future of HR. They do not implement robust HR processes; their approach is agile. The agile HR is the right approach for the near future. Most upcoming trends require HR that is flexible, and that will shape the HR Organization of tomorrow.

The simplification is a trend that cannot Human Resources ignore in the near future. Running a complex organization is expensive; the sophisticated HR processes and procedures are expensive; the long decision-making process makes organization uncompetitive. The company can become quick, lean and competitive if it simplifies its processes.

HR has to focus on the simplification of its complex processes. It has to return the decision making rights back to employees and managers. HR has to oversight processes; it should not make all tactical decisions. Simplification hurts, but it is a part of the future of Human Resources Management. Moreover, the simplification is closely linked to another future issue of Human Resources – the globalization.

The globalization is a genuine challenge for Human Resources. The real global team is not just about one centralized Head Quarter which sends out global policies. It is about the ability of the company to manage the rest of the team from any place in the world. Most globally present companies miss the “global picture” as they try to manage all countries using the same matrix and approach.

HR has to develop new leaders who will act globally. They can operate from any place on the Earth, and they can lead and manage global cross-cultural teams. They have to find the cost effective way to manage the organization globally as the company does not grow in number of global management layers which do not add value and make the decision making process long and painful.

Our leadership development practices will be a significant imperative for us. Most organizations run their operation at risk because they have no successors for the leader. Many organizations do not survive when the founder of the company leaves. The future of HR is about making sure that the new leader grows and develops inside the organization. The company has to be ready to shift the leadership within days because it saves its future.

One of the trends to build a sustainable competitive advantage are innovations and the innovations management. However, most HR Organizations do not understand how they should support changes in the organization. HR has to be able to connect innovations with the traditional change management to design a true powerful weapon against competitors on the market.

Supporting innovations is not easy because the organization has to empower employees to elaborate ideas. It has to accept not to control employees. It has to provide them with the freedom to be creative. This is the moment where HR should step in and design essential principles and training courses for managers. HR has to learn managers how to provide employees with freedom to be innovative and creative. It is a task for the future of Human Resources.

In the future, we can expect a new era of agile HRIS solutions. Today, we use the robust and full scope HRIS solution which fits all our requirements and needs. However, in the near future our requirements will start to change rapidly. The complex and expensive HRIS solution will not be able to keep up with requirements and the maintenance of such a system will be a nightmare.

The new agile HRIS solution will be simple, small, and it will support just the necessary administration of personnel files. However, it will offer a rich connectivity to other systems around which will deliver HR services with high frequency of changes. Times of old and complex HRIS solutions are over.

Social media change Human Resources (even today). HR of the future will have to utilize social media as the best communication channel. However, it will have to define rules for discussions that go beyond pure internal conversations. HR will have to show employees what confidentiality and the business secret means and how they should act.

Organizations will be extremely vulnerable to exposing its business secrets to public audiences. HR of the future will be the master of social media, and it will teach other business functions how to communicate internally and externally without taking excessive risks.

Last trend of the future will be HR in the cloud. HR Data will be present online and most HR processes will be fully paperless. We dream about the paperless HR office for many years, but HR cloud solutions will enable such a future.

Yes, the history of Human Resources is not a finished book yet. Many new HR approaches and processes will evolve as organizations will look for new ways how to be competitive on the market.