The “People” department focuses not just on employee engagement, but the employee experience: they see engagement as the necessarily entailed response to good employee experience.

Employees increasingly come to expect coaching as part of their performance review and benefits that cater to their specific needs or interests. The workforce is changing, but there is not simply one solution that fits all.

Rather than focusing entirely on the nitty-gritty policies that change with new regulations, internal and external, HR needs to lay the foundation for an agile approach to change.

HR agility can meet next-level needs

With agility comes the ability to turn on a dime and leverage the data that ought to inform “data-driven decisions;” with agility also comes the ability to respond to the “continuous feedback” that employees now crave, and with agility comes the power to not just meet the curve but determine it.

But for now, before HR teams begin the bustle of implementing the latest trend, they need to determine how to ensure that the processes and technologies they use can best support them and their ambitions.

When HR gives in to IT, HR innovation suffers

It is not uncommon for HR to cede in the power struggles between their department and IT. A recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management demonstrated that HR departments struggle most to execute their strategies on account of such constraints “as time, staff, technology and finances.”

While there may be a deluge of new proven ways to increase employee morale, create a better work environment, and deliver higher productivity?  Without HR professionals having control of their resources and appropriate technologies, executing these strategies can fall to the wayside as they work to just keep business running as usual.

One way to build innovation into the DNA of HR? Giving your team the authority to make their own changes to the technologies and programs they run. 86% of HR leaders identified knowledge gaps that must be filled in the coming years, including an increased need for tech-savvy employees who are not afraid to get into the systems they use and tweak them when opportunities arise.

Giving HR the low-code/no-code tools it needs

Digital skills and savviness will only become more important. And yet, the answer is not to make all HR employees coders or IT professionals: the goal is to make the HR department a place where anyone with an acumen for the flow of HR can identify the changes that optimize their process.  And where the technology is straightforward enough that those changes can be implemented without IT.