HR Trends 2019: What Matters Most to HR Teams? [Infographic]

If your HR team always looks incredibly busy, it’s probably because they are. While many employees may only associate HR departments with handling employee handbook violations, their roles extend a lot further. When over 30,000 members of the HR industry gathered at our HR Virtual Summit, we decided to survey attendees to find out what’s been keeping HR teams so busy. We asked about their most pressing responsibilities, which initiatives matter most, what are 2019’s HR trends, and how they handle those top tasks.

Current HR Trends

No matter what area of your office you work in, everyone has interacted with their HR team at some point. How could you not when they have so many responsibilities across their organization? These are some of the areas those surveyed are involved in:

• Onboarding
• Employee satisfaction and culture
• Hiring talent
• Benefits administration
• Performance management
• Payroll
• Measuring HR impact

Future HR Trends

While all of these tasks are important, there are some that HR teams were a little more focused on than others. Looking ahead to the future of HR in 2019, those surveyed ranked their top three biggest concerns as enhancing employee performance and engagement, measuring and improving company culture, and hiring the best talent and improving the employee onboarding experience.

Improving Employee Performance

Do managers’ expectations of their employees’ work match up with how the employees are actually performing? Are employees satisfied with their position at the company? Is the company as a whole performing at its highest potential? Employee performance reviews can help answer all these questions. That’s probably why HR professions ranked measuring employee performance regularly as a four on a five-point scale. Even with such a high importance ranking, a majority of companies are only conducting performance reviews once a year. So, it’s not surprising that 37 percent of those surveyed said their biggest challenges with performance reviews are that they don’t happen frequently enough.

Measuring Company Culture

A company’s culture is how its employees interact and work with one another. While you can get a feel for how company culture is doing just by observing everyone around your office, one of the best ways to get some actual data is measuring employee satisfaction. Almost half of HR professionals think their organization is at least somewhat successful at measuring employee satisfaction. The most popular way to measure is with an anonymous survey.

Hiring and Onboarding

Effective employee onboarding makes a big difference when you’re trying to hire top talent. Stacks of paperwork can easily get lost in the shuffle, so over half of HR teams use electronic signatures. But even if parts of the process are online, 59 percent of HR professionals still use a manual checklist to keep track of employee onboarding. Without a software solution, it can be easy for essential steps in the onboarding experience to slip through the cracks.

HR Reporting

HR teams’ top concerns involve gauging whether the efforts of HR actually help their company improve. But, nearly 47 percent of HR professionals indicated that they never measure their impact on the rest of the organization. If HR teams want to improve and be seen as a strategic partner, they need to know how to measure and track their performance. To really enhance performance, improve company culture, and upgrade your hiring process, you’ll need to start measuring the impact of HR on the success of your organization.

If you’re looking for ways to more easily include reporting and analytics into your HR initiatives, BambooHR has some great solutions. Our software includes over 30 pre-built reports to measure just about anything you’d want to know. Here are just a few examples:

• Employee engagement
• Individual and organizational performance
• Employee satisfaction
• Employee turnover

Do you want to see more of what matters most to HR teams? Download the full infographic.