What is a Future of Work Strategy and How Can HR Create One

A ‘Future of Work’ strategy refers to a plan created by organisations with the evolving workplace in mind, putting in place methods for adapting to already developing trends in the workplace and wider world, as well as actions for potential, upcoming trends.

A Future of Work Strategy is adopted by organisations in order to remain adaptable and agile to change, especially in the shadow of the pandemic which both created and sped up many significant changes. Popular trends included in many Future of Work strategies today include but are not limited to AI, flexible working, remote working, workplace culture, and the cost-of-living crisis.

The responsibility of creating an organisation’s Future of Work strategy often falls within the remit of HR leaders, who should have access to rich people data to inform the strategy and tailor it to their organisation’s workforce and are on the frontlines when it comes to adapting the workplace to trends. While buy-in and support from leadership across the business is important, it will be the Human Resources team that take on the bulk of their Future of Work strategy.

How should HR create a Future of Work Strategy?

Gartner outline three key stages to crafting a successful Future of Work strategy – trend analysis, scenario creation, and strategic planning.

Trend Analysis

Identify Trends:

HR teams should look to both internal and external data to identify key trends and may often find that these external sources corroborate what your organisation’s internal data speaks to.

Being tactical about the internal reporting your HR team conducts here is crucial. Due to HR’s often limited capacity, focusing on mining for data around trends that would have the most impact on key, interlinked metrics – such as turnover, productivity, and engagement – will make this task the most fruitful.

Ensuring you have hr reporting software which can provide this data at your fingertips, make customising reports easy, and visualise the results effectively will make a big difference at this stage.

Interpret Trends:

Organise your trends according to how likely they are to occur, as well as how transformative they would be for your organisation – which may depend on your industry, size, location, and other factors.

For example, during the pandemic, many businesses realised the importance of good quality technology that enables employees to complete their work efficiently from home, as well as a flexible people solution as they were unable to record if an employee was off sick with covid. Therefore, this trend is both significant and reality today, causing many organisations to provide generous remote working tech budgets as well as seek out configurable HR solutions that can go the distance.

Prioritise Trends:

To wrap up this first stage, organise these trends according to what you most want to address with your strategy – whether for competitive advantage or in order to mitigate the possible impact of trends that could pose the highest threat to your business goals.

The Boston Consulting Group found that organisation’s with a dedicated strategic HR planning process were 3.5 times more likely to out perform their competitors, illustrating the importance of people strategy in wider business success.

Scenario Creation

With a focus on your high priority trends, map out possible scenarios that could occur from the development of the trends you’ve identified. Consider what the implications of these scenarios could be for your business, such as through a SWOT analysis to ensure you don’t just consider the negatives and threats posed by these scenarios, but also possible positives and opportunities that could arise with them.

Strategic Planning

At this third and final stage, a strategic plan should be formally drawn up to prioritise, introduce, and keep tabs on Future of Work initiatives in your organisation.

Initiatives:

Using your previous analysis, identify the initiatives that will be introduced in your business as part of your Future of Work strategy. Each initiative selected should be backed by data not just to determine its priority for investment and timeline, but to also help your team understand how it is intended to benefit your workplace. This will allow you to understand the exact direction you want to take with it, as well as have well informed goals to measure it’s success by.

For example, two organisations may have decided that remote work was a necessary part of their Future of Work strategy but could have had very different reasons and therefore very different goals.

 One organisation may have implemented remote work because a global, multicultural workforce was part of their ideal culture, and so they may measure the success of the initiative by how many international hires they make over the next year, as well as how well retained and engaged they are.

Meanwhile, another organisation may implement remote work because wellbeing is one of their core values. In this case, using remote HR software to gather feedback around employee mental health, productivity, and any reduction in commute related stress would be key metrics.

Getting Buy-In:

Having set goals for your Future of Work strategy will be enormously helpful to speaking the language of leadership when going to get buy-in for the initiatives you’ve identified. It’s also important to note, that while having predetermined measurements for success is important, your Future of Work strategy goals must be adaptable and flexible to any new, unforeseen trends or environmental factors.

For expert insight on Reporting For Change to C-Suite: A Guide For HR, take a look at our article with Lara Holding-Jones, an HR Data & Reporting Consultant.