Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a good holiday. I took a much-needed big chunk of time off and managed to properly switch off for the first time in what feels like ages. I ate too much, drank a lot of mulled wine, watched loads of TV, caught up with friends and family and enjoyed a few karaoke sessions too. I also somehow managed to avoid Omicron despite going to a couple of parties, a packed cinema showing of the new Spiderman movie, an escape room with the kids, and copious supermarket trips. My rational was that if it’s that transmissible, I’d rather go down with it from doing something fun than from being coughed over in one of the many queues I found myself in over the Xmas period.
And then suddenly it was time to get back to work. I know I am a walking cliché but getting back to work this week after so much time off has been a challenge. Not because I don’t like my job, I love what I do, and I was ready to use my brain again. But because I had to put all the pieces together to figure out what on earth I needed to do. My diary was littered with meetings simply saying things like ‘catch-up’, and devoid of any further, helpful details as to who the various catch ups might be with, or what they were all about. I had to retrace my steps to figure out what was going on. It turns out playing detective is nowhere near as much fun as it looks in any of the many true crime shows I watch (note to self to up my admin game to avoid this scenario in the future!).
So I had every best intention of writing a ‘predictions for 2022’ style blog but having spent the last few days reading all (most) of them already in existence I don’t think I’d be adding much to the conversation. If by some miracle you haven’t come across the predictions I’ll summarise for you:
- The economy will grow but labour and skills shortages will continue to be a challenge
- We will get better at hybrid/ flexible and tools such as Mesh (from Microsoft) and the Metaverse and VR will start to play a role in business
- …and getting hybrid right will be critical to the ability to recruit and retain talent
- We’ll continue to become more empathic and human-centred at work
- The war for talent (I’m not a fan of this phrase tbh) will increasingly be fought inside organisations with internal mobility on the up
- Employee experience will become mainstream
- Inclusive workplaces have never been more important and will become a major differentiator
- Employee wellbeing will help to propel growth
- HR will become more devolved, with line managers stepping up
- And the approach to people will become more individual, local and diverse
- People analytics will continue its meteoric rise, and anyone involved in the people side of the business will need to develop a basic level of competence when it comes to analytics
- The way we assess performance has changed for good, moving from presenteeism to outputs
Some of these points are obvious ,‘no sh*t Sherlock’ predictions (don’t shoot the messenger). And some of them are maybe further out than we think – Mesh/ Metaverse/ VR etc feels tantalisingly close given the Oculus Quest 2 was THE Xmas gift for 2022. But the reality is, many companies still have a long, long way to go regarding tech.
If you need convincing just look at the industry which has grown around how to connect and engage with remote workers – yes we are still talking about this, despite the proliferation of tech solutions that could solve this issue. And some of the predictions above we’ve been talking about for a good few years, such as the rise of empathy, an individual and local approach, and the increased focus on EX. So rather than add my thoughts to the list above what I’d like to do is share my hopes for 2022 and beyond:
- I’d love to see EX taken seriously and move beyond the re-branding of HR via inclusion of a token life-cycle model
- And I’d love to see engagement finally move on from the obsession with measurement and benchmarking
- Companies investing time and effort to truly know and understand their people would make me very happy
- And related to this, it would be amazing if we can get comfortable with not having all the answers, and actively avoid inventing solutions in ivory towers – it’s as simple as asking our people what could work for them and learning from this
- It would be great if everyone could be more human, and be more ‘themselves’ at work. I’d love to see less business speak, and toxic behaviours and more kindness and love at work… just basic decency and manners would go a long way!
- And finally, I would love to get to a place where we no longer need to convince anyone that getting it right with your people is the right thing to do
I could go on but thought I’d better leave it there.
I’d love to know what you think – what are your hopes for 2022?
@Emma
