Workforce Magazine asked a group of HR leaders to make their best prediction of what HR will look like in 2018, and they are certainly expecting some major changes! Some of the items the experts agreed on include:
- An increased focus on infrastructures—such as social networks and wikis—to support building strong relationships and collaboration
- Companies will need to balance the need for a unified global culture with local strategic and cultural differences and make core global values locally relevant and easily understandable for all employees
- Societies throughout the world will focus on work as a more important crucible for social progress and values
These are serious social changes which will seriously impact the way in which employers interact with employees, and are also just some of the reasons why you can't workforce plan using just historical data...many of the items discussed in the article don't exist yet, so their impact is not yet visible in your historical data. And according to one of the respondents, the rate of change is increasing, not staying constant. Of his 27 years in HR, Ernst & Young's Kevin Kelly said:
In my last five years, the rate of change is greater than in the first 22
Food for thought.
Note that in developing the lists, Workforce used the Delphi Technique, which is also very useful in workforce planning - it's one of the techniques we teach in our workforce planning workshops!
What things are you anticipating will impact your workforce in the next 10 years? OR, since 10 years is really a little long for workforce planning, how about impacts in the next 2-3 years?
