Welcome to 2022.

It has been a wild ride for Human Resources over the past two years. Disruption has become the norm, with COVID-19, social awareness, changes in demographics, globalization, and the Great Resignation impacting the future of work. But one thing is certain, HR has solidified itself as a strategic partner to the business, and 2022 permits HR to elevate the organization by improving the employee experience while driving company profitability.

2021 taught organizations a lot about their workforce. A historic 4.5 million workers quit their jobs, seeking higher pay, work schedule flexibility, and autonomy. They also sought a better sense of purpose and belonging and wanted the ability to grow professionally. For HR, this represents an opportunity to find better ways to engage with employees and develop clearer career paths. These paths must focus on enriching the employee experience while training employees on the right skills to improve and impact the business. Companies that will remain competitive are those that can hire effectively, enrich professionally, and retain successfully.

Successful HR leaders partner with executives to identify the future of work for the organization and create workforce strategies and learning initiatives to get there. Identifying high potentials, assessing current vs. future skillsets, assessing inclusion, encouraging learning, and advancing employees are critical steps to align people learning strategy with business strategy. These steps will also drive employee engagement and increase communication, transparency, and retention.

In today’s fast-paced, mobile organization, ensuring that employees are receiving the right training at the right time is critical. Beginning at onboarding, employees need paced learning that drives their success without overwhelming them. As employees grow, HR must ensure they have the right technical skills to successfully fill their role. This includes continuous learning and upskilling to ensure team members grow and adapt to the future of work. Providing soft skills training is also critically important. Communication, Problem Solving, Teamwork, Emotional Intelligence, and Critical Thinking are just a handful of soft skills that are often talked about but seldomly implemented as learning objectives.

Personally, here in my Practice at Net at Work, we are going through several transformational changes to best serve our customers. This includes analyzing the solutions that drive our customers’ accomplishments, diversifying our product mix to fully support our clients, and promoting and hiring team members that exude our core values. For the latter effort, we must ensure our team has the training and skills they need to be a trusted advisor to our customers. That takes learning hard and soft skills through measured learning management processes that result in successful outcomes for our team, our customers, and our partners.

When analyzing your engagement initiatives, make sure to assess your learning management capabilities as well as your technology stack. While rolling out successful learning initiatives is important, tracking the completion of learning objectives as well as the successful retention of that learning is critical. Automating these processes through a Learning Management System allows HR teams to continue to focus on strategy and not get bogged down in administrivia. Net at Work can help you with this process. Please register for our Webinars focused on Training and Learning, view pre-recorded sessions on the topic, and speak to your Account Manager on how we can support you. To 2022!