From a People Strategy shared with Management based on listening to the rethinking of the work organization model, which must aim for an expanded concept of flexibility, clear objectives and intelligent digitalization of activities. With Emanuele Madini, Partner of P4I, we have collected some ideas from which to start to design the future roadmap. For many HR departments, 2024 could be the year of restart. Let’s start with an assumption: over time, the contours of the “new” way of working have become increasingly more evident.
New needs are gradually being identified, not only organizational ones but above all those of the people who work in the company. Now, it is up to the HR Departments to define with the Board which strategies to carry forward and how to do it: from the age-old problem of retention to employee motivation, passing through the experimentation of the short 4-day week, there are many multifaceted aspects to work on.
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What Are The Good Intentions for The HR Management In 2024
And so, together with Emanuele Madini, Partner of P4I – Partners Innovation and Practice Leader of the “People & Innovation” area, we thought, as we used to do at the beginning of the year, to identify five good intentions that the HR Management should follow in 2024 Objective: work on some fixed points, and from there design the rest of the strategy.
Redefinition Of The People Strategy
After 3 years of emergency management of HR policies, 2024 will have to be year zero for many organizations of rebuilding a real People Strategy – underlines Madini -. In a context that is no longer emergency and profoundly changed compared to the pre-Covid era, it will be important to start both by listening to people to respond to their needs and define the drivers of engagement and by involving all Management so that the principles of the new People Strategy truly become a shared manifesto on which the entire organization is committed and do not remain just a work plan of the HR Management”.
What will make the difference, therefore, will be having a solid alignment at Group level, everyone going in the same direction in a compact way, and remembering that listening to needs, needs and difficulties makes the response stronger and more effective.
Also Read: How RPA Can Augment The Human Side Of Your Business
New “Tech-Enabled” Leadership Models
Quiet quitting , Engagement , Hybrid Work, and wellbeing are just some of the priority challenges which, in continuity with past years, will place the need to define and promote new leadership models at the center of the priorities of the HR Department . However, I hope to detect more innovative and concrete approaches in 2024 that combine traditional management awareness and training paths with initiatives that consolidate new behaviors and management styles in everyday life – reiterates Madini -. I am referring, for example, to continuous feedback tools to stimulate relationship models and continuous top-down or peer-to-peer improvement.
Or tools to offer constant monitoring of people’s engagement with dashboards tailored to each team or Work Analysis to understand the evolution of work organization dynamics (e.g. meeting management, network analysis, …). It is right to make managers responsible as key actors of change. Still, the organization must also promote structural changes in HR processes that are consistent with the new leadership models proposed”.
What organizations must be clear about is that, on the one hand, it is essential to accompany Leaders and Managers along a renewed employee management path; on the other, to effectively put “people at the center”, as we were often hearsay, it is necessary to have an updated picture constantly, and this is only possible by having solutions available that collect data and process it. It is no coincidence that more and more companies are moving towards the adoption of Employee Experience platforms, which allow the extrapolation of helpful information and performance indicators to evaluate, guide and refine the employee journey.
Smart “Hybrid” Working
In the last part of 2022 we witnessed a consolidation of Smart Working models, at least from the formal point of view of the definition of organizational policies having to deal with the end of the simplified emergency regime.
According to Emanuele Madini, If we can say that Smart Working is now increasingly becoming the normal way of performing work, at least for professionals in companies with more than 250 employees, it is also true that one of the good intentions for many HR departments in 2024 it will have to be to support teams in a real rethinking of the work organization model, which requires a profound change focused on the expanded concept of flexibility, on working towards objectives and on the intelligent digitalization of activities.
Although this change requires a greater effort than the simple definition of an organizational policy, we can say that it is an obligatory path if we do not want to risk a “boomerang effect” on people’s engagement and wellbeing”. The data speaks clearly: as revealed by the latest research from the Smart Working Observatory of the Polytechnic of Milan, workers who use remote work without having rethought the organization of work in hybrid mode experience levels of engagement and wellbeing even lower than those who work in person.
Wellbeing
The emergency context we have experienced and the profound change in work organization models have caused a significant impact on workplace wellbeing, which we can divide into 3 dimensions : physical, social and psychological . Only 9% of workers declare that they are well in all three sizes, and the most critical aspect is the psychological one (source: HR Innovation Practice Observatory, Polimi). This explains, therefore, why attention is growing on the mental, physical and emotional health of employees.
In 2024, it will become increasingly important for HR Departments to launch initiatives to improve the wellbeing of workers to avoid cases of increased turnover or decreased productivity – reiterates Madini -. Among the actions that can be undertaken, we can certainly mention the following: definition of new work-life integration policies and decalogues of behaviour in the use of digital technologies to avoid cases of hyper-connection, promotion of an inclusive and based work culture on mutual respect and different needs which must certainly also pass through new leadership models and, finally, raising people’s awareness of the possibility of adopting healthier lifestyles inside and outside the organization”.
And speaking of leadership, it is worth remembering that, as the Gartner ranking of HR priorities for 2024 also highlights, today’s work environment requires leaders to be more authentic, empathetic and adaptive. These three imperatives foresee the birth of a new “human” leadership.
Digital Upskilling And Reskilling
Although the pandemic has accelerated the digital transition, companies still suffer from a deficit in terms of digital skills (26.1%, source: Report on training in companies in 2020, created by Istat. ). Added to this is also a greater urgency to strengthen the soft skills necessary to deal with sudden and unexpected changes, such as those that the Covid-19 health emergency has brought to the production context, and beyond.
Even in 2024, the attention of HR Departments will have to be focused on upskilling and reskilling initiatives to enhance people , where the critical success factor will not be limited only to the creation of innovative training approaches based on a return to a balanced mix of digital and in-person formats, but above all the ability to know how to engage people continuously , creating self-awareness and motivation to learn.
Strengthening internal communication approaches and tools, use of gamification techniques and experimentation with new digital coaching and nudging technologies must certainly be at the center of any upskilling and reskilling program”, concludes Madini.
