At the beginning of 2021 and after months of the outbreak of the health crisis, they began to enact a series of trends in the field of HR. Although many of them have been fulfilled, many others have done so with nuances and many others are far from what was said at the time. What trends in HR have materialized in 2021? From Woffu, a startup specialized in optimizing employee time management, each of them is analyzed.
Has teleworking come to stay?
In the harshest months of the pandemic, telecommuting was the “lifeline” for many companies. Later, when little by little the so-called “new normal” was established, remote work was seen as a trend that was here to stay. Today, as Woffu experts point out, the data show that this is not the case.
According to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), 31.3% of workers carried out their work at some point remotely before the pandemic. In the months of the state of alarm, that figure rose to 46.7%. However, according to the Institute, in the first half of this year, the professionals who planned to telework were only 35.3%. That is, only four points above the figure recorded before the pandemic. Why has teleworking not caught on? One of the main causes is, according to Woffu, and that we already mentioned in this article, the obstacles that the Teleworking Law causes for companies and the need to physically interact with co-workers.
Hybrid models
Another trend that has been talked about a lot throughout this 2021 is the so-called hybrid model. It is one in which face-to-face and teleworking are combined. It was commented that it was a model that would become widespread and permeate in companies. However, the current reality is far from that. In relation to the previous section, it has been seen how companies have chosen to “go back to the office” and meet their employees in person.
“The hybrid model that, a priori, seemed the most appropriate because it combines the virtues of teleworking and being physically in the office, has not been fully established due to the problems that managing this work model entails for companies”They comment from Woffu. One of the main difficulties that entails is the management of the schedule in this modality. There are many companies that have not been able to adapt and, therefore, it is very difficult for them to manage the schedule in this option. Therefore, it is important to have expert solutions in time management.
Digital onboarding
At the beginning of 2021 it was commented that, since the digitization of companies and teleworking was booming, the onboarding –Or set of actions that accompany the new employee in their immersion in the organization- would also be digital. This is a priority process as the numbers speak: over 40% of new hires leave in the first month (Equifax Workforce Solutions).
Do that accompaniment process digitally It is very complex. It has been seen that the acceleration of the vaccination process had an impact on the return to the office. This type of process has been preferred to continue doing in person. To this is added the fact that a series of specific tools are necessary that many companies do not have.
Digitization of HR processes
After the outbreak of the health crisis, companies were forced to go from face-to-face to digital in a short time. This exposed the weaknesses of many companies in terms of digitization. For this reason, a large part of them “got down to work” in this area.
Training, selection, onboarding, performance evaluations, time management … began to be done digitally. And this is corroborated by the data, 53% of Spanish SMEs consider that their level of digitization has improved during the pandemic according to the GoDaddy 2021 Digitalization Observatory. However, 55% of companies affirm that they still use paper in much of its processes.
Employee emotional well-being: pending issue
The pandemic and all its consequences have seriously affected the mental state of all people. In the workplace, the situation is the same. The stress caused by the health crisis means that employees have experienced mental health problems. Thus, 64% of Spaniards admit that in the last twelve months they have suffered some form of anxiety, fatigue or exhaustion due to their work situation (Hays).
According to data from Adecco, nine out of 10 executives and middle managers have failed to manage their teams during COVID-19, which has caused a wave of cases of burnout syndrome. Thus, as pointed out from Woffu, although after this impact of the crisis caused by the health crisis, the emotional well-being of employees became a maxim, to this day, it remains a pending issue.
