Revolutionizing the Industry: 3 New HR and Workplace Practices to Watch

Client-facing innovation is an important focus for companies of all types, but comparatively little time and energy are directed toward approaching internal activities with the same eye for improvement. However, in this robust job market, it’s more important than ever to take a hard look at your company’s internal HR and workplace practices. Any organization that falls behind will find it harder and harder to attract and maintain top-notch employees.

If your workplace isn’t on the cutting edge of the latest talent acquisition and management strategies, it’s not too late to catch up. Companies across industries and around the world are streamlining employee onboarding and review cycles, enhancing employee learning and decision-making, and disseminating information more effectively than ever before — and yours could be one of them.

The following are three key innovative practices organizations are using to attract and retain talent through better candidate and employee experiences. By taking steps to adopt these practices at your organization, you can position your company as an appealing employer of choice for the best talent in today’s market:

1. Eliminating the Annual Review Process in Favor of Collaborative Goal-Setting and Ongoing Feedback

The antiquated annual review process continues to be a major pain point for managers and employees alike. The totality of an employee’s day-to-day work can’t be adequately summed up in a single annual review, and the process offers no real value to the worker or their manager aside from documentation.

As company leaders think more seriously about the best use of time, energy, and resources, they are realizing more value would be delivered if employees focused on smaller incremental goals throughout the year instead. Rather than looking back at the previous 365 days, employees should think about what they are doing today, what they want to be doing in 30 days, and where they want to be in 90 days. This progress-oriented version of performance management allows employees and managers to respond more quickly to the realities of the workplace and make more informed decisions about what their goals should be at any given moment.

Doing away with the annual review process also democratizes the workplace. During an annual review, feedback and decisions typically come from one person: the manager. However, managers are not always the most knowledgeable about what an employee does on a daily basis. To make the best decisions about an employee’s current and future performance, managers should be looking to the people who know their work best: their coworkers and colleagues. When an ongoing review process is opened up to feedback from multiple sources close to the employee, managers have more — and more reliable — information to work with.

Annual reviews can also hamper the flow of constructive criticism. Managers know the outcome of an annual review has high stakes for an employee’s future with the company, so they may be less likely to offer negative feedback that could block the employee from a promotion or raise. However, in an ongoing feedback framework, no one piece of feedback has the power to get an employee promoted or demoted. That fosters more accurate, constructive, and honest dialogue.

For more expert HR insights, check out the latest issue of Recruiter.com Magazine:

2. Leveraging New Technology to Reimagine Work

Many companies, including us at Curriculum Associates, are thinking about how to onboard new employees more effectively. With the help of the latest technology, employers can now give new hires the opportunity to experience the work they will be doing before they even start the job. This can help ease the transition and get new hires up to speed faster.

Business schools already use simulations to help prepare students for real-world challenges, and companies are putting similar technologies to use in the onboarding process. Organizations can map out the experiences a new hire will typically have during their first few months on the job, and then use technology to simulate some of the tasks and challenges they’ll face. The employee can practice making informed decisions without any actual consequences, preparing them to tackle difficult situations when they occur in the real world.

On a related note, companies are also using predictive indexing technology to determine which candidates will be the most successful in certain positions by mapping their skill sets to the skills required by a role. These assessments can also be used to improve internal mobility, by helping employees identify the skills they’ll need to develop to get to the next phases in their careers.

3. Utilizing an Informed Community Model to Disseminate Information

Companies typically push information to employees, but employees are a source of information as well. Businesses are starting to realize they should capitalize on that fact by using employees to disseminate information, too.

Innovative organizations are now creating internal informed communities of company influencers. As it turns out, a company’s biggest influencers are not necessarily people in positions of power. Instead, they are often those in-the-know workers to whom others turn when they need help. It’s the company’s job to find out where the information is already flowing between employees and engage with those influences. By arming internal influencers with the right messaging and information, companies can ensure valuable conversations keep going.

This “informed community model” democratizes the flow of information in a company, since information no longer arrives exclusively from the top down. Your employee influencers are part of the community, and to leverage these resources, you need to break down the barriers that keep information flows stagnant and unidirectional.

Companies can also take it a step further by creating subgroups of employees with interests in specific business topics, such as diversity and inclusion initiatives. Then, the company can leverage these groups of internal influencers as a resource when needed. It’s all about bringing people together to solve problems, and it is the business’s duty to facilitate and encourage those connections.

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As HR pros, managers, and leaders, we have a responsibility to make our companies run more effectively. By replacing annual reviews with ongoing feedback, leveraging AI to reimagine work and enhance employee learning, and implementing an informed community model to disseminate information, companies can position themselves to move quickly and efficiently in an age of fierce competition. Even better, in addition to improving operational efficiency, these practices can also create the kind of positive candidate and employee experiences that improve recruiting and retention.

Sabrina Williams is chief people officer at Curriculum Associates.