Are you struggling with creating a positive workplace culture that keeps current employees happy and attracts the best talent? We have the employee trends that HR professionals will be tasked with adopting into their policies through 2020 and beyond.
The benefits of a great working environment include boosting employee retention, productivity, and engagement. In 2020, workplace trends will continue to see an increase in the focus on creating a positive workplace culture that can impact organizations, their people, and their bottom line.
Unfortunately, there are some common misconceptions about how to create a workplace culture that promotes positivity. Some examples include perks such as Ping-Pong tables, pets at work, unlimited time off, or onsite yoga. While some of these ideas might work for some, they are trends that fail for most companies.
Instead, HR leaders in 2020 will pivot away from implementing out-dated benefits as the way to improve workplace culture. They will adopt policies that create a proactive, robust, and multifaceted culture strategy. Examples include ensuring leaders demonstrate and reinforce key organizational values, equipping managers with critical skills such as conflict management and coaching, and training all employees in culture-building topics.
Managers used to spend most of their time during the workday on administrative tasks, with little time allocated to strategy, innovation, and developing talent. With today’s integration of workforce management technology, those administrative tasks could be completely automating, giving managers the time to work on improving relationships with their employees and stakeholders.
Some examples of how automation software is impacting what employment trends are occurring in the workplace today include:
For 2020 workplace trends, the new role of managers is to be more human and less machine. For recruiting processes, HR representatives are now targeting managers that can focus on building relationships, supporting team members, and focusing on strategies that take organizations to the next level.
Mental health continues to become a growing concern, with more Millennials and Gen Z’s leaving jobs due to mental health concerns. In 2020, HR leaders will take mental health seriously, and adapt their policies to help workers who have suffered from it.
One of the ways that companies are treating mental health concerns is by hiring therapists and creating health centers to support employees. Some organizations are creating programs that bring therapists to employees, so workers have easy access to services and don’t have to travel to make an appointment.
Retaliation occurs when an employer punishes an employee for engaging in legally protected activity. Retaliation can include any negative job action, such as demotion, discipline, firing, salary reduction, or job or shift reassignment.
Retaliation may be the next big issue that takes the workplace by storm in the coming decade. Unless organizations create policies in 2020, and take swift and meaningful steps to safeguard against it, the results may be devastating.
To prevent this looming crisis, organizations must do more in 2020 than simply point to a non-retaliation policy. They will need to train all executive, managers and employees to understand how and why retaliation occurs. HR must put systems into place to proactively check-in with whistleblowers and monitor any changes to their working conditions and performance reviews.
With a shift in the status quo of employees being more outspoken about harassment and workplace concerns of all types, retaliation is a workplace trend that HR cannot afford to ignore.
New laws and a heightened awareness of harassment in the workplace will continue to drive the need for effective harassment prevention training. Unfortunately, much of the harassment prevention training in the past has been ineffective for a variety of reasons. HR and training and development professionals will have an opportunity to reverse this trend through 2020 and beyond.
While organizations continue to provide harassment prevention training that meets the content requirements of state and local mandates, they will also increase their focus on the effectiveness and impact of that training. Organizations will look to incorporate training techniques and subjects that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has indicated are most promising for actually preventing harassment from occurring.
With over 25 years of experience, Paypro has the top-notch software support for policies that outline today’s trends. Our top priority is to find significant operational savings, making your business better, faster, and on the front edge.
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