60% of 1,000+ HR leaders feel that their biggest challenge is emotional exhaustion this year, either for themselves or their team members.
Organizations have had big plans to become digitally agile, truly inclusive, and future-focused. But the rate at which these changes are taking place makes it seem that the pandemic has galvanized them into action. With employees becoming more vocal about their needs and building remote cultures becoming a priority, HR leaders’ roles have changed.
LatticeOpens a new window has just released the findings from its first annual State of People Strategy report, which covers 1,000 HR leaders from companies in 37 countries. One of the report’s key findings was that 60% of the HR leaders feel that their biggest challenge is emotional exhaustion for either themselves or their team members. This follows the findings of Bupa Global’s Executive Well-Being IndexOpens a new window , which found that 78% of business leaders experienced poor mental health when the pandemic hit.
Conversations around mental health are increasing. Remote working will become the primary way to work. Both these trends will have their positives and negatives, which will define how HR leaders need to balance them and act accordingly.
A lot has already been shared about how employee mental health an essential area of focus. But what is critical to understand from the current survey is that while the emotional fatigue seems to have been recognized for employees at large, the fact that HR leaders are experiencing it too in such a big way needs to be further addressed. Leaders must continuously ensure that they are available for employees to unburden their work-related concerns. But where can HR leaders share or speak about their stress? Creating a virtual channel for this need that specifically addresses leadership challenges is a business need.
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Other Key Findings
As per Lattice’s survey, the top priorities that HR leaders are planning for 2021 are employee engagement, manager enablement and training, diversity, equity & inclusion (DE&I) programs, and learning and development. In addition, 42% of companies surveyed plan to reassess and revamp their remote work policy to give employees the option to work from the office or remotely.
Due to the movements in diversity, 67% of the respondents shared that recent events have inspired them to either start, go beyond the basics, or drastically increase their DE&I programs in the next 12 months.
HR leaders are now breaking the mold to move beyond traditional people processes, to adapt to new ones that are more attuned to the current workforce. Present-day talent wants to work for a socially conscious organization that empowers and engages them, and one that creates an environment of learning and upskilling.
Diversity hiring has picked up in most organizations. To remove the negative impact of discrimination charges, companies such as Pinterest have gone a step ahead and hired a Black board member who is a woman. But this alone cannot meet the need for an inclusive workplace.
Organizations that aim to make DEI a priority must look beyond tokenism and lip service by first accepting that they have an issue and then using the right combination of leaders, technology, and communication to make bigger changes. Gender equity and racial justice are not terms that can be loosely translated as numeric goals but disruptions that need to be taken internally to recreate the organizational culture.
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The future of work and how the business world will look like for the next decade or even decades to come is clear. Now this blueprint needs to be converted into an implementable approach that also addresses employee needs. Â Diversity, learning, and mental health have so far received only cursory attention from organizations. Diversity has been restricted to hiring targets, learning to online courses, and mental health to counseling. Can organizations widen the gamut of their benefits and policies to make these areas more comprehensive?