As technology progresses and new methods of doing human resource tasks are born, it is only foreseeable that we will be seeing new trends every year.
Past trends influence new ones, which is why it is essential to look at old HR trends to bring back some that worked well at that time. Significant influences on working individuals included the transition to remote work, higher employee turnover rates between companies, and so on.
The most important HR trends we saw last year in 2023 include quiet hiring, employee recognition, stealth recruitment, loud quitting, and mass firing. We will be discussing these topics in depth later on in this article.
Why are human resources so crucial?
In the past, many businesses thought human resources to be an extra expenditure for the company and unnecessary in the long run for their employees. Thankfully, this culture of negativity has changed for the better over the past few years.
Engaging in a positive business and work culture is what drives companies forward now, with employee happiness being higher and outputs seeing positive results synonymously. This work positivity is essential, not a luxury anymore. This is also where human resources come in because it is the tie between the headquarters or higher-ups and the employees.
What defines business success?
Businesses aren’t easy to run but human resources give a large boost to a company by taking care of employees and advancing workflows. Rather than short-term, companies are looking to make long-term profits since it ensures that a company will experience long-term success. Next to long-term profits, companies also seek sustainable growth to maintain their profit goals.
How does HR aid companies?
Employees are the pillars that hold the company up, making their existence essential. Human resources go further than the bare minimum. HR is meant to reinforce rules, aid employees, and develop a positive work culture through organization and employee monitoring. We will talk more in-depth about employee well-being later, but this is what HR truly focuses on.
There are also administrative tasks that human resources do, such as organizing wages, managing employee performance, training new candidates and developing existing ones, onboarding, recruiting, and generating a positive business culture adhering to the company values.
Quiet hiring
The brother concept of quiet hiring is quiet quitting and has been making its rounds across unhappy employees. Quiet quitting consists of an employee who checks out mentally from a job, rather than quitting. This phenomenon shows up as the employee doing the bare minimum and finding no importance in their workplace.
In contrast, quiet hiring is the act of companies scouting out employees already within their company who seem promising for other areas of work. This strategy is being used to replace hiring new employees with just using existing ones. Quiet hiring aims to fill in the gaps within a company using the talent they already have.
In other words, quiet hiring means finding new skills without hiring new people to do it. For example, a tech firm needs three more software engineers to meet the annual goal of the company. In turn, it would take nine months for the three new hires to join the company, making the goal unattainable with this strategy. Thus, quiet hiring is implemented.
Talent is a finite resource for companies, making this strategy uniquely efficient, especially with the economic difficulties everyone faced last year. The difference between blatant employee usage and quiet hiring is that this strategy is open and communicative towards its employees.
The relocations are explained to employees, and the temporariness of this is highlighted. Open communication and consent to relocation are key in this strategy. This doesn’t decrease employee engagement and satisfaction, thanks to the transparency. Employees have an opportunity for wage negotiations and flexibility thanks to this situation.
Employee recognition
Turnover rates have been increasing due to employees being generally unhappy. Part of this issue is the lack of recognition they are getting, which decreases their will to do better and focus on their work. The solution is developing a culture of recognition at the company that makes employees feel seen and useful to the company, giving them a purpose.
Recognition is especially important for younger members of the workforce and this method can promote healthy competition among employees. It also creates a satisfactory work experience for everyone, which might catch on and start being reciprocated among peers. Effort into the work also increases if recognition is being shown.
Staff loyalty and employee loyalty should be recognized by companies as valuable behaviors exhibited by their employees.Behaviors companies should recognize from employees include meeting goals, showing creativity and innovative thinking, adaptability, increased performance, or years of company loyalty that should be adequately rewarded.
With employee recognition software, organizations acknowledge and appreciate their employees' efforts and achievements publicly.
Stealth recruitment
Stealth recruitment is similar to quiet hiring in the sense that the company scouts for potential employees. The difference is that hiring professionals are the ones involved in finding passive candidates or employees at other companies to potentially hire later on or send an offer to.
It is a trend due to turnover rates being high, making finding potential new employees a necessity before a resignation notice even hits the desk.
Loud quitting
With inflation on the rise globally, people are needing higher wages just to survive. All the stress from 2022 turned into a new tactic for employees to negotiate at work. We’ve mentioned quitting earlier, which is the concept of mentally checking out or quitting your job while still working there.
Loud quitting is the opposite of quiet quitting. It is the bold act of letting your superiors know you are looking at tastier cookies from the cookie jar. All sectors are in strong competition to find talent, making this tactic a harsh but effective one for valuable employees to use.
The reason behind the use of this tactic is usually the culmination of different unsatisfying or straining factors in an employee’s work life that leads them to the need for a pay raise. The correct way to execute a loud quit is by doing it directly in front of your bosses rather than your colleagues, which can backfire as being considered disruptive.
Mass firing
Mass firing has been a recent phenomenon observed, especially in the tech world. Companies have been firing hordes of employees monthly. A mass layoff consists of 50 or more employees being relieved from a company. Statistics show that over 152,000 employees had been laid off in 2022 from over 100 different companies.
This firing is mainly due to the aftermath of the pandemic. Everything moved online, include remote working companies hired more heads than they needed to ease the brunt of the economic force we experience during the pandemic. Companies also get negative attention from mass layoffs, thus having been postponed to 2022.
Conclusion
We are becoming increasingly certain of the HR trends from last year that have followed us into the new one. Hopefully, we will see positive economic and ethical growth from companies and a rise in employee satisfaction.