The pandemic became a serious test for companies, people, and technology. HR and IT teams absorbed the first shocks because they had to solve an urgent question together: how could employees continue working remotely with the help of technology?
In addition to formally moving people to remote work, HR teams acquired responsibilities that had not previously belonged to them. They had to track illness, employee movement around the city, and office attendance.
More difficult challenges are likely to follow, and their early signs are already visible. Significantly, these challenges sit at the intersection of people and technology. People are a company’s most important capital, while technology is a catalyst for its development.
Let us examine five changes that may reshape relationships between employers and employees and consider how businesses can prepare for them.
1. Human and Robot Affairs
Rapid technological progress, especially in artificial intelligence, is creating a need to regulate the relationship between people and machines. Companies will face basic operational questions about how tasks should be divided and how the human-machine boundary should be controlled within business processes.
They will also face new ethical questions:
- Can a machine decide whether a person should be hired, promoted, or dismissed?
- How can a company preserve its individuality and culture if it becomes entirely digital?
IT teams need to prepare infrastructure that can transfer existing processes into electronic form, including business process management systems. Such systems have become much more accessible and, in some cases, are available at little or no cost.
Companies should experiment with delegating routine work to robotic process automation and gradually shift their monitoring focus from infrastructure toward end-to-end business processes.
HR teams, meanwhile, will need to invest more deeply in employees’ creative initiatives and personal projects. The role of managers should move from controller toward helper and mentor.
Employees also need a clear explanation of the benefits and consequences of advanced technologies. The discussion should involve as many people as possible rather than remaining inside a small group of executives and technical experts.
2. Attracting and Retaining Talent
The coming decade may bring a severe shortage of young workers and a steady rise in the average age of employees.
At the 2021 “Conference of Opportunities: Career,” Natalia Zhuravleva, a managing director at Sberbank, stated that by 2030 as much as 70% of labor resources could consist of employees aged 55 and older. Research by Korn Ferry supported the broader expectation of a talent shortage.
The growth of remote work for foreign companies may accelerate the aging of the domestic employed workforce by allowing younger specialists to participate in international labor markets without relocating.
Companies will therefore need to learn how to retain experienced employees while also competing more intelligently for younger talent. This is not only an HR problem. Technology influences the quality of the employee experience, the ability to work flexibly, access to knowledge, and the speed at which a person can become productive.
HR and IT teams will need a shared view of the workplace as a product. Recruitment may attract a person, but outdated tools, confusing processes, or a weak digital environment can quickly push that person away.
3. Employee Well-Being Around the Clock
Even companies that had never treated employee well-being as a systematic responsibility received a demonstration during the pandemic. Tracking the number of employees who became ill or recovered became mandatory for many organizations.
These newly formed skills may become useful in the struggle for talent. Work will need to become a genuine second home—not in the old sense of endless overtime and irregular hours, but as a comfortable environment in which employees do not experience stress every time they move between their home and working lives.
Many companies still have a problem here, particularly when their technological maturity lags far behind the world outside the office. For an employee, it can feel like moving from the twenty-first century into the Middle Ages every morning and then returning in the evening.
Sooner or later, the mind protects itself from that dissonance. The result may be burnout, disengagement, psychological strain, or physical health problems. Companies will need to improve their level of digitalization simply to avoid creating this conflict for their employees.
Materials from Deloitte and McKinsey identified several directions in which employee well-being programs were developing:
- Physical health: encouraging exercise, tracking physical indicators, location monitoring, and emergency buttons.
- Mental development: continuous learning and corporate competitions.
- Psychological and emotional health: monitoring and reducing stress and improving the climate inside the company.
- Personal finance: spending control, investments, retirement programs, and financial literacy.
- Delivery of work: flexible hours, goal-based management such as OKRs, working from anywhere, and shorter working weeks.
- Mutual support: assistance from the company and from colleagues, including formal and informal virtual teams.
- Motivation: understanding productivity at work and identifying the reasons behind low performance.
Some people may see this degree of involvement as excessive because it reaches into employees’ private lives. Yet greater support can also create a major benefit: more freedom in how people organize their work.
The challenge is to find a balance. Companies need to support people without turning care into surveillance and to use technology without destroying trust.
4. Zero-Learning Onboarding
While a new employee is learning and adapting, the company is investing in that person almost as it would invest in a startup.
Research cited in the original article suggested that up to 20% of employees could leave during their first 45 days and up to 30% during the first six months. When a new employee performs little productive work during that period, a substantial share of the company’s investment in recruitment and onboarding is lost.
This helps explain the growing popularity of the “zero-learning” idea: a new employee begins creating value almost immediately.
The goal can be approached through gamification, lower barriers to entering a role, and optimization of the company’s own business processes. This is where digitalization belongs. Employees can learn while performing real work—or perform useful work as part of the learning process.
The task becomes more difficult for HR because onboarding programs may need to account for different age groups and different levels of previous experience. Individual adaptation plans are likely to be the strongest solution.
Technology is essential here as well. Even relatively simple BPM and wiki systems can organize the process, preserve knowledge, and help an employee understand what to do next.
When a candidate does not fit the company, both sides benefit from discovering that as early as possible. The fastest way is to involve the person in real production processes and real tasks after a short period of preparation.
5. Strategic Partnership with Employees
Supporters of lifelong employment face difficult times. Companies will not only compete for talent; they will also confront employees’ declining desire to remain in the same role or organization for many years.
People may want to change not only positions but entire fields of activity. This is one consequence of sharing models and the gig economy.
Forecasts cited in the original article expected Russia’s freelance market to grow by around 20% annually. Nikolai Dolgov, development director of Gazprom Neft’s Professionals 4.0 platform, argued that large companies would increasingly work with freelancers. At the time, one in four companies was reportedly considering replacing as much as 30% of its staff with independent specialists.
To respond successfully, HR teams need to develop managers’ ability to work with freelancers and distributed contributors. The pandemic showed that not every manager could lead even their own remote employees effectively; some organizations returned people to offices partly because managers lacked the necessary skills.
Traditional employment relationships may therefore evolve toward strategic partnerships between a person and a company. A specialist may join a project temporarily, contribute expertise, and then move to another organization or field.
Companies will need transparent goals, modular processes, reliable digital access, rapid onboarding, and a culture that allows temporary contributors to work productively without being treated as outsiders.
Conclusion
A company’s future success will depend heavily on how smoothly it integrates employees with advanced technology. Life is accelerating, and ideas that recently belonged to science fiction are becoming normal business conditions.
This makes partnership between HR and IT essential. The departments do not necessarily need to merge, but they do need shared strategic priorities and a common understanding of the employee experience.
Dell recommended asking several questions whenever a company considers a new IT service or solution:
- How will the proposed solution make employees more productive?
- Will it continue working if employee demand and requirements increase?
- How will it help the company attract and retain talented people?
- Will employees trust it while performing their responsibilities?
By asking one another these questions, HR and IT teams can build a stronger partnership. They will then be better prepared to face future challenges not merely with fewer losses, but with tangible benefits for the business.