Top 3 business tech trends

As they use tech to optimise operations, firms will also pay more attention to employee well-being. By Sandeep Sharma

The pandemic has compelled many businesses to speed up their digital transformation to accommodate remote working as well as general operational improvement.

At the same time, it is transforming the employer-employee relationship, with further implications for human resources strategy. Here are three key trends that are set to continue into 2022 and beyond:

1. Cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning investments will continue to be top technology priorities in 2022 and beyond. As plan-execute-analyse cycles become shorter, we expect more organisations to tap into these technologies to make faster, data-driven decisions to build their operational agility and resilience, particularly during uncertain times amid the pandemic.

Within the finance function for example, these technologies will further catalyse finance digital transformation, enabling finance teams to evolve from a purely stewardship role to becoming strategic business partners who play a key role in providing actionable insights and data-driven analysis to inform business planning and strategy.

This is especially important as finance teams will also increasingly find themselves having to keep a close watch of non-financial data from a tracking and reporting perspective, as more businesses place environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) goals among their key business priorities.

2. Businesses will pursue workforce optimisation and automation as well as skills development more aggressively to address labour shortages and skills gaps in their organisations.

Amid the Great Resignation and as the war for talent wages on, we expect companies to make much greater use of automation designed to drive efficiency.

Rather than “acquiring talent”, we expect there to be a paradigm shift to “creating talent” instead.

This will require business and HR leaders to better understand the skills across their organisations and enable employees to more dynamically activate those skills, by creating more options for how, when and where work gets done.

As skills are important to organisational agility, upskilling and ensuring that internal skill sets are expanded will be crucial in preparing for current and future disruption.

This shift will also give employees new areas of expertise they can use to further their careers, which can help companies retain their talent for the long term.

With a skilled workforce wellequipped for the digital era, organisations will see benefits such as reduced external hiring costs.

3. Companies will look to hire for new roles focused on employee wellbeing. As the pandemic continues to wear on in 2022, we foresee organisations looking to strengthen employee engagement, with greater emphasis on their experience, well-being and development.

Today’s leaders recognise that engaged, productive employees and lower attrition are critical to support the company’s strategic goals. In doing so, we expect to see more companies hiring for new roles tasked with the responsibility of analysing data on what employees want, the effectiveness of the programmes and benefits companies offer, and what a business needs in shaping the well-being policies of a company.

For example, one new role could be a “business psychologist”, which is a role we introduced at Workday to help us better understand the psychological science behind employee engagement, keep a pulse on the needs of our workforce, and to deliver a better employee experience.

Sandeep Sharma is president for Asia of Workday, a US based financial management and human capital management software vendor.