The past few years have been rough on businesses and HR professionals. 2023 is not set to provide an immediate solution to the struggle but there’s hope on the horizon. HR professionals have learned a thing to tackle the biggest HR challenges the pandemic has brought about. These times have also made it clear that businesses need good HR goals to succeed.
Gartner has been asking about the best HR goals again. They surveyed more than 500 human resources leaders across 60 countries. The findings revealed the top priorities professionals have from building critical skills to creating a better organizational culture.
If you’re looking to re-direct your HR department’s focus to align with the key challenges of 2023, then insights from other professionals can help. Our team has looked at the research and listed what we think are the top goals of HR you should go after this year.
Top goals for HR professionals in 2023
Your HR department should focus on achieving the following goals by the end of the year. They can help shift the focus in the right direction and strengthen your business with future challenges in mind.
1. Onboarding remotely
The past few years have changed the way we work in many different ways. The Covid-19 pandemic forced most of us out of our offices and remote work skyrocketed during this time. HR professionals had to start dealing with the different elements of recruitment remotely. Onboarding remotely was among the top challenges, and an HR goal to focus on.
It’s important to ensure that even when you are onboarding new employees remotely, they still need to be introduced to the team. You need to set up remote meetings and opportunities to learn about the business. It is also essential to create remote training systems to ensure new and old workers feel comfortable working in new environments.
2. Focusing on employee wellbeing
Since the start of the pandemic, HR has to put employee experience and well-being at the top of all priorities. Focus on wellness programs has been a buzzword in the industry for a long time but it now has to become an actionable function of the HR department. There has to be a clear focus on making sure employees can take time off, have adequate healthcare insurance in place, and have tools like attendance management systems to look after their mental and physical wellbeing. The truth is that a happy and healthy employee is always more valuable than a sick and sad one.
Well-being should be especially important for those who continue promoting remote work environments. It’s important to make sure HR and upper management don’t check up on employees only when they need to know work-related things. Having a weekly check-up to see how employees are doing can be an important way of letting them know you care. You should keep employee records updated with these aspects as well to give HR professionals a better view of the employee journey.
3. Promoting learning and development
Gartner’s surveys in the past two years have shown how many HR professionals are focused on prioritizing skills. That’s a good idea, especially in light of what happened in the past few years.
A business cannot grow properly if it isn’t able to identify the skills it needs. You can’t have the HR department simply running after talent without understanding what kind of talent your organization actually needs.
Traditional ways of hiring are long gone. You also can’t stare at a narrow set of skills anymore. Employees need to have flexibility in their skills. That is something the pandemic has made clear – many jobs required a set of new skills when national lockdowns happened. Employees who might not usually require many IT capabilities were suddenly navigating Zoom meetings and Slack lists.
Therefore, you need to make flexible skills a top priority. Employees need to be good at what they do but also be capable of changing their skill sets if the job requires it.
This isn’t just about hiring new candidates. You probably have many amazing employees in your current roster who you want to hold on to. It is important to include them in skill development. You don’t want to run an organization where employees have static skills. Instead, you need to develop a forward-looking training system identifying the skills of the future. Once you identify those skills, make sure your employees get them.
4. Building a healthy organizational culture
If there is one takeaway your HR department needs to take from 2022 into 2023, it’s organizational resilience. Companies have been forced to change their operational functions within the space of days due to the aftermath of the pandemic. Traditional organizational structures were overturned and shaken to the core. The companies that are still thriving under these circumstances are those that could answer to these changes fast.
A big part of organizational resilience comes from responsiveness. This starts right from the bottom – if employees are spending a lot of their time going through hurdles to get anything done, they are already causing the company to grind to a halt. That is why HRIS which engages employees and automates mundane aspects of the HR process can be such an important tool in building resilience. Simple solutions, such as your payroll management, move from having to jump across seven signoff processes to being a simple click-and-accept system. Shift schedulers that allow employee input is a big part of a well-functioning organization.
You can’t just stare at the efficiency of your organizational structure but you must also focus on its resilience. Your HR department might work well for now. But what if the rules around holiday pay change tomorrow? What if travel restrictions stop your employees from testing products? As the previous two years have shown, anything can happen and if your organization cannot answer to changes fast, then you’re going to suffer.
Organizational resilience should be a priority because it not only improves company longevity but also cuts costs. It’s much better to invest in a flexible and scalable technology now than to be running catch-up every time the world changes.
5. Prioritizing retention
The past HR professional goals have often focused on the need to attract talent. This has put the HR department’s focus on job titles, pay grades and employee benefits. These are important, there is no denying it. But it’s also essential to focus on the employee experience. It doesn’t matter how good you are at attracting top talent if your business cannot retain it.
Accenture’s 2020 Workforce Study showed that employees are mostly looking forward to the experience that adds meaning to their work. Employers need to provide employees with an opportunity to do something worthwhile. If you can put adult development at the core of your job offering, you can not only find talent but also keep them happy at work.
As mentioned above, you want to provide employees with opportunities to develop and create meaningful change. On top of this, you can also improve the employee experience with more traditional methods like offering a competitive salary and great employee benefits.
Looking closer at workplace diversity, equity and inclusion
Today’s organizations must also emphasize workplace diversity, equality, and inclusion. In 2023, it’s important that your HR goals are focused on creating a diverse workplace. Studies have shown the many benefits of a diverse and inclusive workforce. It can help:
- Boost creativity and problem-solving within the organization
- Make smarter decisions
- Increase profits and overall productivity
- Reduce the employee turnover rate
- Enhance your business’ reputation and brand image
It’s, therefore, a good idea to put diversity, equality and inclusion at the core of your HR goals for 2023.
Meet Bayzat’s HR managers
Our HR managers think the above HR goals are not just about succeeding in 2023 but preparing your business for the future. Immediate and day-to-day activities are important. But if your organization is not able to respond to new, unexpected challenges and its employees don’t have the skillset you need in the next five years, then you are going to lose out. Big, transformative things happen in the modern world all the time. Organizations that can’t respond to those and adapt to the changing world are ultimately going to go away in a whimper.
That ideology is at the heart of our HR products. They will help you:
- Put your employee wellbeing to the front and ensure your organization is full of happy and healthy employees.
- Focus on nurturing skill development and hiring with not just today’s but also tomorrow’s skills in mind.
- Build more organizational resilience by adopting the right technologies to make sure everyone in the organization can take action and respond to challenges.
So take a look at the different HR software solutions available at Bayzat. Together we can help your organization reach these big HR goals and build resilience in your workforce.
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