HR Trends 2022: The 5 Items You Need On Your Agenda

The overarching themes in my view will be recruiting, retention, productivity improvement, and people analytics will all be in focus.

From where I stand, I think HR will continue to venture outside of itself and push the boundaries of what defines existing HR work in the year ahead – especially when it comes to these five topics…

The market for top talent is incredibly competitive. For example, one study from Indeed showed that 79% of employers have had trouble recruiting in recent months. For 76% of them, this had a negative impact on their business.

To close those hiring gaps, it makes sense that start-ups and growing companies will only continue to invest in recruitment. From there, competition will only become more fierce!

At Personio, our focus in 2021 was on developing a crystal clear employer branding and hiring strategy to optimise the effectiveness of our recruiting process.

Two important cornerstones of this was: Having the appropriate applications on hand, but also in developing more competitive compensation models.

The People & Workplace team at Personio includes HR, internal IT, and Office Management. Amongst those three sub-teams, coordination and smooth people processes have only become more important in our work.

That’s why, in 2021, we put even more focus on tying together people processes through People Workflow Automation as a key lever. This isn’t to simply ensure that processes run, but that they run smoothly while maximising our productivity.

This pays directly into our HR strategy: Not only will the people experience in our teams be improved. Automated workflows will also give them more time for value-adding opportunities, such as promoting employee wellbeing or helping our leaders manage hybrid teams.

In 2021 alone, our teams grew from 450 to 1100 employees. For companies growing that quickly, leaders are important multipliers of both company values and culture. They also serve as role models and anchor motivation and commitment.

We will invest heavily in leadership development for exactly that reason. It will start right from onboarding by teaching the cornerstones of good leadership, but also anchor our "Great Leaders Do” principles.

These will be the basis for role expectations, performance targets, and development measures moving forward. In keeping that focus, our aim is to build the knowledge of our Team Leads and increase their confidence in key leadership topics.

And, in parallel with those efforts, we will foster a strong peer network to ensure regular knowledge sharing between leaders.

Data has always played a key role in optimising our processes and improving the way we deliver our People Experience. Next year, we want to expand on that!

The focus of that expansion and continued reliance is with one goal in mind: Enabling our recruiters and People Partner teams to identify focus areas and figure out key ways that we can improve the different stages of our People Experience journey.

Ultimately, it’s really about expanding how we use our people data, and then using it to key in on specific areas for improvement.

Last year made one thing abundantly clear: There’s little sense in trying to go back to a time before Covid-19. We’re here, and now we need to learn and move forward.

In 2021, companies had to continue to think about and expand their actions in a mostly hybrid setup.

For our team, that means keeping our eye on two key trends:

• DE&I – We are growing fast, and especially in a somewhat-remote setting we want to scale our culture and define areas of focus accordingly.

• Wellbeing – Establishing measures to address the reality and aftermath of the past few years, to promote mental, emotional, and physical health amongst staff.

That brings us to the end of this year’s article covering the relevant trends we foresee in 2022 (and, potentially, even beyond that). I hope it helps your HR or People Team start to strategise and prioritise for the journey ahead!