Top HR Trends for 2024: Know, Use What’s in the HR Toolbox to Drive Change

There are many issues on everyone’s minds in 2024 when it comes to human resources (HR) trends. Whether your focus is on people, technology, compliance, or future planning, the topics are the same. Each HR department will prioritize differently and hopefully will find the opportunity to put the right emphasis on what is important to their organization.

There were many challenges in 2023, such as companies either moving away from remote work or fully embracing a 100% remote workforce; companies rightsizing their workforce to ensure their long-range goals; managing a volatile economy; and perhaps embracing newer technology to meet some of those goals.

Let’s look at what we expect our top HR trends to be for this year (in no particular order).

 

Employee Retention

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges HR departments face today is how to retain talented employees. How many organizations feel as if they are a training ground for other companies? We need to hire, train, and promote from within all the while designing a plan that embraces all of these components. This is a difficult task for HR teams. The plan must be managed fairly and consistently by all levels of management and has to be applied uniformly to be successful.

What is included in your retention plan? One thought to consider when designing one is to determine what is important to your employees. It may not be the same as what is important to you. Having an HR department that can engage with employees and get an honest answer to that question, and then communicate that with executive leadership, is an invaluable asset.

The company’s perception might be that wages is what drives retention, while the employee is looking for work-life balance or economical health and welfare benefits. Surveys are a great tool to gather this information, however, many employees don’t trust in their confidentiality. If you choose a survey, perhaps use an outside, impartial vendor that will provide the data but not the respondent information.

 

Technology

With the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and other technological developments, the modern HR department can uniformly apply rules across a larger data set, get quicker responses to team members, and analyze data more efficiently to get important trends identified and communicated to leadership.

In 2022, only a quarter of HR departments reported using AI, but that increased to 38% in 2023 with an additional 33% indicating they will likely use it in 2024.

Imagine being able to not only report on what your employees can do today, but what they can do in the future. AI can assist with identifying not only skills that are present but also skillsets that are missing and subsets of employees ready to move up in their career paths.

Imagine using AI in your recruiting efforts by identifying strengths and weaknesses that are important to your organization.

We can also use AI to build automation to look for errors or inconsistencies in data provided or use RPA to assist with answering questions in a help desk scenario. However, we want to be sure that we are using these processes as tools for our department and not to replace the “human” in “human resources.”

The HR department would have a larger seat at the table if they can drive operational growth discussions with data stored in the human resources information system (HRIS) solution. Being able to pinpoint areas where there is a concentrated pool of employees or candidates over time might be a game changer when you are trying to staff positions.

 

Analytics

While analytics goes hand-in-hand with technology, it is an important tool itself in the HR toolbox. Being able to provide quantitative data to executive decision makers on headcount and staffing needs, hours of work performed, and labor costs are the most widely provided analytics today.

Data surrounding your employee demographics, labor trends, benefits, time, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are integral to understanding your business. Additionally, analytics can be used to audit data for accuracy.

But we should also be able to reach into that toolbox and drill down into more operational data. Being able to provide data on attrition and reasons for employee terminations would allow leadership to identify an underperforming manager and potentially mitigate litigation-related claims later.

Perhaps benefits enrollment and reasons for non-enrollment, benefit coverages, and costs are important top line data to have when determining the offerings for the next open enrollment period.

From the payroll side, it would be great to have instant data surrounding time capture usage or the number of manual edits being performed on timecards.

Once you have the power of the data behind you, reporting and providing quantitative analytical data to the stakeholders becomes a game changer in the HR world.

 

Knowledge Sharing, Succession Planning

Succession planning is a strategy where management identifies future opportunities for leadership and business-critical roles well before they are open and crafts a plan to pass on those roles to existing team members, creating a talent pipeline.

Knowledge sharing is defined as having processes in place to share critical information across the workplace. This should not be confused with training newer team members for their new roles but would include information that will assist in the decision-making process for those team members.

When I face a problem with a solution that can be either black or white, I remind myself that a company rarely lives in those binary spaces. They are more likely to live in the gray area in between, and understanding the complexity of these problems will make your department more successful.

The premier HR department can use AI technology to identify the team members who may be part of that talent pipeline for the executive leaders. Identifying those opportunities where business-critical positions may be vacated and when they will be vacated well in advance allows the leadership to plan properly for the open position. AI and analytics allow us to dig into the data, perhaps determining age of retirement by position or region.

When we think about business-critical positions, it is not just the C-Suite or senior managers. If you are a small manufacturing shop with three shift team leaders on the floor, losing one of them can be critical to your business.

Knowledge sharing is the process of exchanging information between team members or organizations. It can be explicit (thinking of processes) or tacit (coming from experience). In its truest form, knowledge sharing is conversational, engaging, and adaptable. Sharing one’s business or life experiences with others cultivates a more loyal and productive workforce, allowing your teams to problem solve together. HR teams are challenged with finding and perhaps creating opportunities where these can organically happen, while recognizing their importance in the future of the organization.

We expect to see more of a focus on team building and retention with an emphasis on knowledge sharing and succession planning in 2024.

 

Pay Transparency, Pay Parity

Pay transparency laws or regulations that require employers to disclose information about compensation and benefits are becoming more prevalent across the country. The change in the regulations are challenging HR departments to balance information typically managed privately with employees and what is now required to be out in the public domain.

How do we avoid pay compression when we are posting a new position, and the market rate is higher than what we are paying currently? What happens when other employees realize they could, and maybe should, be at a higher income level? How is this going to affect employee retention? HR departments are faced with all the above as more and more jurisdictions embrace pay transparency regulations.

Pay parity is the requirement to demonstrate there is no gender or cultural pay gap across the workforce. This should not be confused with pay equity, which is equally important.

HR departments should focus on creating a compensation strategy that is not discriminatory. Conduct a pay audit—a pay equity analysis to detect pay disparities across demographics—and then start addressing the pay gaps through more inclusive hiring practices, reviewing your compensation framework, and reviewing access to training plans.

 

Cultural Transformation

Our conversation thus far has been about the importance of technology and training in the HR space for 2024. The reason for the refocusing is obvious: At midpoint 2023, many companies started looking inwardly at the changes that came about over the COVID-19 restriction years and how the changes affected their business culturally.

Moving from an in-house workforce to a 100% remote workforce, to a hybrid workforce, and back to in-house exemplifies the dynamic changes HR departments need to manage through.

Your business needs to stay relevant in the market to ensure it attracts quality candidates for open positions and keep existing employees’ engagement and mindsets connected to the organization’s goals.

HR has a unique role in managing a company’s cultural transformation to stay abreast of changing technology, employee retention, changes in workplace benefits, etc. HR must be able to advocate between the company’s goals and the employee’s need. The HR department needs to determine how to change the culture in the workplace and steer the process so the company benefits from the needed changes.

The HR department will be met with its own challenges, most predominately a lack of employee buy-in, a lack of reinforcement with the organizational changes needed, or the new culture not reflecting leadership styles or employee skillsets. Communication is the key to overcoming these obstacles, building trusting relationships and clearly explaining expectations.

Being the strategic partner in the task of creating a new culture, having a seat at the table, will ensure an HR department’s success. If the role of HR is to simply deliver the message, important concepts of the change will be missed, and the transformation will fail.

Use metrics from your analytic suite to measure your successes and failures. Looking at retention, absences, and reasons for terminations are all a great way to determine if your change is being embraced. Be ready to have it evolve; cultural transformation is evolutionary and fluid based on economic conditions, regulations, and social influences.

 

Talent Management

As part of their employee retention strategy, HR departments across the globe are looking at internal and external training opportunities to keep their employees engaged. Having a staff of master’s degree-level HR staff members is not always the best solution. Companies need team members in all departments—from entry level to senior executive—to support the company’s goals and initiatives.

Employees want to feel valued and giving them opportunities for personal and/or career growth will align with ways to increase your team’s professional satisfaction needs, thus retaining more high-caliber and happy team members.

Building out that training path to meet your requirements should be one of the focuses of the HR department in 2024. Once you have an equal footing for skills requirements and education/training needs, it is also much simpler to review your pay parity audit and review.

You can build out notification reminders of team members who have training coming up or are in need of a certain type of training by using AI or RPA. Is there a certification set to expire that needs to be renewed? Your new RPA can run over your data and let you know who needs what particular certification.

By storing résumé data in your system, you can use AI to search for people who may have a certain qualification that is otherwise overlooked. Internalize your employee searches, recruit from within, and train for future growth.

HR departments in 2024 can be strategic partners to the C-Suite when determining what is important to the overall successes of the company. Some of the trends noted above are consistently on the list every year. I believe the number one focus this year should be cultural transformation using the tools noted in the additional trends identified.

Long gone are the days when the HR department was thought of as recruiters responsible for hiring, firing, and benefits. The HR department of today is responsible for so much more. By using the tools in their toolbox and analytics, HR departments can drive change in the company to ensure the company’s growth, well-being, and success. They are no longer an administrative function but a partner with the executive leadership.

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Cari Breitinger, CPP, is Director of HRIS and Payroll at BELFOR. She is Co-Chair of PayrollOrg’s Strategic Payroll Leadership Task Force (SPLTF) Best Practices Subcommittee and a member of the Board of Contributing Writers, the Government Relations Task Force (GRTF) Child Support and Garnishments Subcommittees, the Shared Services Task Force, and the SPLTF Emerging Technologies and Global Payroll Subcommittees.