In this 21st century, human resource is one of the most significant aspects in a company’s road to success. If you ask 10 entrepreneurs about the biggest challenge in forming a business, almost all of them would likely indicate one thing – cost management. But in reality, HRM, the people part, is the most challenging part in a business.
People form the most integral part of maintaining constant growth and retaining sustainability in a company. From an HR standpoint, maintaining such a crucial part of a company presents both challenges and opportunities.
And so, to better understand some of the current human resource challenges, we’ve put together a list that’ll help you to get ahead of the HR problems and think about how to solve HR issues.
10 Common HR Challenges and Issues
The biggest challenge of maintaining a global presence is to understand the HR needs in a certain region where the workforce is located. All these could be bundled with cultural differences and language barriers, which makes the current human resource issues even more challenging.
Regardless, the core principles of HR still apply to most companies around the world while addressing the following HR issues:
01. Emphasizing On Employee’s Mental Health and Overall Wellbeing
Coming out of the COVID-19 lockdown for well over 2 years now, the importance of employee wellbeing cannot simply be understated. In fact, one pandemic has taught every company in the world to emphasize employee wellbeing and mental health to keep their productivity and motivation on an optimum level.
It is safe to say that all the buzz around mental state health conditions is not to be taken lightly by any HR leaders. It is why companies are investing large sums of money to ensure the employees’ health is ensured and so they remain confident in facing new challenges and opportunities.
02. Creating A Sense Of Accountability As A Core Part The WorkPlace Environment
The first step toward creating a productive workforce is to create a self-accountable culture inside the workspace. This action ties everyone working in a workplace into being accountable for their actions, decisions, and results. Having a repercussion for these decisions help the employees to take the effective decision, thus creating a self-driven productive workforce.
03. Adapting to A Hybrid Work Model
Adapting to a hybrid work model is still a massive challenge for every company around the world. Even more, this change was forced due to the COVID-19 situation. Yet, such adaptations in the work environment have shown positive results according to studies conducted by Nasscom and Indeed.
Almost 70% of the companies are trying to adapt to a hybrid work environment after discovering that it increases employee satisfaction by 66%. This is to say that testing and implementing a successful hybrid work model is a significant challenge for every HRM.
04. Securing The Talent Recruitment War
One of the most prominent problems of every HR group is to continuously draw the best talent from the global talent pool. Besides, in order to employ the right talent for your organization, not only do you have to sell him/her the job, but also the work location.
Add remote recruitment, interviewing, and signing to the list and it compounds the challenge of hiring the right talent. This is to say that there is no golden framework for hiring talent. And with global presence, it becomes increasingly difficult to employ and allocate the right resources in the right places.
05. Creating A High Performing Workforce
Creating and maintaining a high-performing workforce is a challenge even for the most efficient HRM in an organization. Working on and offsite has made it even more challenging for HR leaders to maintain a balanced output as seen during the COVID-19.
To focus more on the point, there is no proven methodology or framework that can be used to boost the productivity of the employees working onsite and offsite. This makes it confusing for the HR leaders to take the most efficient decision to motivate their employees and keep their productivity rate at an optimum level.
06. Using Automation to Perform The Routine Tasks
While HR is highly involved in making the entire workforce efficient and productive, it’s important that the team becomes efficient itself. Using AI tools and automation techniques, 56% of all HRM tasks can be automated according to research led by McKinsey Global Institute.
Even though automation allows a lot of time to train and educate the employees, there are still a lot of caveats to this process. Such as – tasks like critical problem solving, teamwork, listening, communication, and understanding – all these are impossible to replicate and automate using AI tools.
07. Being Acquainted with Knowledge of People Analytics
Being able to make informed decisions is one of the best ways to create an accountable working environment. Using a data-driven decision-making policy backed by People Analytics, HR can create a decision-making system based on pure information.
Up and until now, corporations have relied on experience, intuition, team collaboration, and mutual understanding in making important decisions. However, with the inclusion of people analytics, the HR teams feel confident about taking effective decisions. However, it leaves the challenge of training the HR teams in analytics, strategy formulation, and generating outcomes.
08. Authorizing The Use of A Universal Cloud-based HR Application
In 2023, every HR employee must know the use of HR and payroll software for employee management. This can be done efficiently using a unified platform rather than using a number of apps dispersedly.
Even more, this allows for efficient communication between different teams and their employees, thus reducing the communication gap and loss of valuable information.
09. Discussing Ideas on Positive Change and Compatibility
Not all people in a workplace are susceptible to frequent change as reported by Gartner in their 2023 goals. Their study shows that minute adjustments in daily workflow create more than 2.5 times more anxiety-related stress than large and infrequent changes.
This is to say, such changes can put a lapse in the employees’ productivity, and concentration, and might disrupt the overall workflow to a certain extent, thus unsetting them.
It is the job of HR to build trust in its employees and to ensure that minor changes do not necessarily affect their productivity bubble inside the workplace.
10. Achieving A Measurable DEI Progress
This is a common underlying issue in any workplace as for most HRM, DEI is a strategic objective. Most often than not, organizations tend to put marked DEI indicators on a low priority list in favor of other business objectives. This is why many HRMs face the problem of holding their company accountable for not providing the actual DEI results.
Endnotes
Even though the current human resource issues put the HR of an organization under many challenges to make efficient use of its human force, there are still viable solutions to tackle them in very specific ways.
And, no matter how diplomatically we approach solving these problems, the pandemic has completely changed the plot of this whole situation. This forced HR around the world to rethink new approaches to solving the top human resources issues.
Nevertheless, each change is a new way to rethink, improve our solutions, and develop an effective HRM strategy for the future.
