The only certainty is uncertainty, wrote human resources expert Lars Schmidt. But one thing is clear: the era of human resources as a back-office function is over.
Two years ago, I wrote an article on how the HR world will change in 2020. Then came the global pandemic, the relaunch of racial equality and social justice and the dramatic shift to the digitization of work accelerated many of these predictions.

The past two years have been a roller coaster for the human resources field. Our mission is to lead our organization through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, design and revise (and revise again) a return to the workplace plan, create a new "personal operation in the cloud" remote working model, and more.

As the field of human resources and personnel operations looks forward to 2022, we will pay more attention to the changes we face and our role in driving the continuous development of the world of work. We have become more adaptable to the ambiguities pervading the pandemic and understand the need for agile methods that can adapt to our evolving new world of work.

The human resources field is a scope, some of which still operate in a legacy environment that is mainly transactional, while others have more advanced and proactive practices. The following are some of the different ways that human resources departments will begin to appear in 2022:

Hybrid 2.0

When the pandemic swept the world in March 2020, the world of work became distant overnight, and they transplanted office-based communication and collaboration systems to digital systems. It's not pretty, but we figured it out. With the launch of the vaccine and the vision of the pre-pandemic office seemingly about to emerge, 2021 brings the hope of "returning to the workplace". Then new variants appeared and delayed these plans, putting us back into a cycle of uncertainty.

The remote and hybrid work model that we have relied on for the past two years is mainly ported to a digital office-centric framework. Meetings are still the core way to get work done. Our efforts to create fairness and equality for those who enter the office and their remote colleagues are largely inconsistent.

Flexibility rule

Human resources departments used to follow a one-size-fits-all approach. no longer. In the past two years, we have listened to a lot of opinions from our employees to better understand their working methods, needs, etc. This awareness refocuses the human resources field on the employee experience, and allows us to plan together with employees—not just for them.

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Working in the pandemic reinforces the reality that different employees have different needs. Some people desperately want to go back to the office. Some will never come back. Some people want to have the right to choose when and where to work. Companies that give employees autonomy to make decisions that best suit them will have a clear advantage.

Fairness, tolerance and access

In the past decade, our approach has expanded from "diversity" to include fairness, tolerance, belonging, and access. After the murder of Jeremy Floyd, the tech giants invested $3.8 billion in racial equality programs. But does this have a meaningful impact on driving change?

There is still a lot of work to be done in the human resources field to eradicate the inequalities that have permeated our company-from salary fairness to board representation. Although some companies have made anti-racism promises, others seem to have regained their past habits.

Talent flow continues

We have spilled a lot of ink on the great resignation and have felt the pain of the loss of personnel within our company. Under the hustle and bustle, what really happened was a "big migration," as the industry analyst and writer Matt Bersin effectively described it.

The current job market is fierce. As companies compete for an advantage in this highly competitive recruitment market, recruiters are posting jobs faster than software engineers. The "talent war" now transcends technology and is expanding to areas including retail, where employers provide previously rare benefits, such as signing bonuses. According to data from the US Department of Labor, job vacancies have exceeded 10 million for five consecutive months.

Yuanjie is coming

Facebook caused a sensation when it changed its name to Meta earlier this year, which was an endorsement of their investment to expand into Metaverse. Although virtual reality is not new, the barriers to access (mainly hardware) continue to decrease, opening up more use cases for HR and personnel operations.
As companies migrating to remote and hybrid models strive to fill the gaps in drinking fountains and on-site meetings, Metaverse will help bridge the analog-digital divide. Companies such as Remote and Accenture are sending Oculus VR headsets to new employees for a range of purposes such as onboarding, training, and meetings; to a more casual always-on space where employees can connect, play games, and watch live events.

WEB3 on our radar

Metaverse is usually tied to the nascent world of web3. Although we will not see the widespread impact on HR, as this situation develops, we should pay attention. In general, web3 includes technology, open standards, cryptocurrency, blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFT), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), decentralized finance (DeFi) communities and new creators economy.

Great reset

The pandemic has overturned the construction of work itself in many long-standing industrial ages. The time, place, and manner of work has surpassed the limited traditional view of nine to five in the office. Of course, there will always be traditionalists who want to go back to an era of work that no longer exists before the pandemic. They will work in companies that strive to attract and retain talent in 2022 and beyond.