5 HR Trends For 2013

It has taken me sometime to assimilate all what I have been hearing from CEOs and Entrepreneurs for 2013 to come out with what lies in store for HR  in 2013. The future is looking good and businesses want to growth this year. They are cautious and do not want to repeat mistakes of the past few years, some of them are still learning and cautious. With elections around the corner, we are expecting the Govt. to give boost to industry, create more jobs and announce all the goodies to harvest an election in 2014.

I have compiled a small list from my perspective of what lies in store for HR Leaders in 2013. Here are the top 5 trends I am already seeing emerging in 2013.

Building Capabilities 

We had seen tremendous growth in few sectors in the past decade and jobs grew faster than people. People were growing in their jobs and everything was hunky dory till the time tide ebbed and as Warren Buffet say we discovered everyody had been swimming without clothes. Many rapidly growing sectors hid the flaw of people and  their ability to manage their jobs. Once the tide ebbed management saw who had they been promoting all these years into bigger and bigger jobs, they were shocked and horrified. Suddenly every single person from the CEO to the frontline manager was short for the job they were performing and growing with till now. 2013 will see all the growth industries of last decade spending more rupees on building capabilities of their employees. These capabilities will specifically be built for strategy (managing both growth and downturn), managing others (boss and subordinates) and as Tichy calls the cultural and political scenarios of the corporate.

Simplifying Competencies

We all have seen a competency dictionary (correction only HR has seen it) and top management throwing all important terms at each other and specially the bosses throwing them at subordinates regarding the same. Competencies come in all shapes and sizes and once seen as panacea of the HR and business problems, competency words and definitions will have to start talking plain English of business and layman language. Hopefully then competencies will become useful for the corporate and ordinary mortal employees. Competencies will have to talk to solve business problems instead of remaining a dictionary of complicated words. On second thoughts why not throw the whole thing out and work with solving business problems through something Marc Effron calls  Success Factors (you can check these out on www.talentstrategygroup.com)

Identifying Talent
 
Do we know your top talent? Is it deployed in the right place and is it growing? These questions will be asked more often by board in all the 4 quarters of this year. It will be imperative for us to identify, deploy and retain talent.
 

Distinguishing Talent

Are we treating talent as we treat others? Are we afraid to stand up for it and slaughter some holy cows of parity and democratization of performance and compensation. We will have to give managers sharp tools to identify Talent rightly, have the guts to share the message with the rest of the team and deal with human anxiety of the rest of the team to give edge to performance in the organisation.

Leadership Skilling

We will have to hone and sculpt leaders from identified  Talent. We will have to invest time and money into future rather than today (today is doomed anyway and nothing much is happening) in 2013r. We are seeing some early cautious optimism in the economy before it revvs itself into frenzy (in the coming years), we should be ready with the right Talent to take risks with it and ride the trough once again.

Here is wishing you a Talented year ahead!!