With the rise of COVID-19 cases in March and April of 2020, the newly formed remote workforce completely changed and immediately required modifications of Human Resource (HR) policies. It also dictated that HR would need to rapidly adapt to new technologies. Now, remote work has become the norm for most companies, and by 2025, it is projected that 70% of companies will work remotely for at least five days a month. However, approximately 35% of employees are not comfortable or savvy with HR Technologies, which HR leaders will need to consider when investing and implementing new technologies. Consequently, companies are collecting more data and are more closely monitoring their employees’ activities than before the pandemic. These actions raise data ethics and privacy concerns that will need to be addressed by HR leaders. As such, HR leaders should manage employee expectations on how they are being monitored. The best way to communicate these expectations is for leaders to explain the tools being used, the purpose for monitoring, and the results.
COVID-19 has also created the perfect test ground for the propagation of cloud applications; hence, 20% to 25% of companies will be accelerating their transformational strategy in 2021. Cloud technologies have become the go-to model for delivering applications, and COVID-19 put these on-demand systems to the test. Cloud technologies provide greater configurability and elasticity while offering employees secure single sign-on access from remote locations. In this detached and isolating environment, collaboration tools play an important role in supporting a sense of engagement and belonging for the remote workforce. Within this new remote reality, employees need to be able to communicate and collaborate so that the organization can maintain its culture and continue to conduct business effectively.
The future of business post-COVID-19 will see the normalization of remote work and the full adoption of HR cloud technologies and collaboration tools with the added burden of data ethics and privacy concerns. Ensuring employee satisfaction, easing remote work, maintaining a data secure remote workforce combined with a highly productive workforce should be at the center of an HR leader’s strategy. Data collection should be balanced with privacy concerns, the goal of which should be to build employee trust to ensure HR technologies respond to a dynamic remote workforce.
Harvard Business Review - If You’re Tracking Employee Behavior, Be Transparent About It
Gartner - Remote Work After COVID-19
Deloitte - Five workforce trends to watch in 2021