Our Hybrid Workplace Reality

In this day and time, remote workers may be your business’s salvation.  Wherever you are in the world the talent you need may not be available.  They may be already employed or want more compensation than you are able to pay.  However, post-COVID, the global workforce potential is and can be an attractive solution.  But how do you find the talent you need and once you find them, how do you engage them and how do you keep them engaged?

The likelihood is that they will need not only organizational cultural training but national cultural training and your current leadership and employee population will also have to be trained to understand and interact inclusively with the new global talent who is becoming a part of their team.

There is an opportunity for global PEOs, job boards and new talent management solutions to gain in popularity and become more of a resource than in the past.  When a global employee is hired virtually, as long as the company and the managers understand how to manage globally, there isn’t nearly as much red tape as hiring them live!

Look for new niche businesses exchanging talent globally and offer it at much less than ordinary recruiting fees.  Hybrid workplaces are here to stay.  Pre-COVID it would never have been possible to think about building your business completely with a remote workforce.

In a February 2022 Forbes article, Bryan Robinson, Ph.D shares that remote work which was under 4% of all high-paying jobs pre-pandemic was up to 9% at the end of 2020 and is headed toward the 15% mark by the end of 2022.  

In the same article, Marc Cendella, CEO of Ladders shares that it is the largest societal change in the world of work since World War II.

The need to understand where in the world you can find the talent you need, and when you need it will be for Talent Management and Executive Leaders an imperative. Tools like the Skills Beyond Boundaries platform, designed to allow inter and intra-business skills transfer and other platforms like it, will become more in demand and will offer that new slant on staffing and talent management needed to face the new hybrid, global talent pool.

This makes managing and understanding how to support a virtual world of work a compelling need of the moment.  Tools like virtual reality and augmented reality will become more prevalent and commonplace in workplace environments.

Metaverse may have been previously the space for gamers but today as technology grows to support the need to engage and include virtual workers these tools are on the road to becoming an ordinary part of day-to-day work.

At the recent SHRM Annual Conference in New Orleans, I was able to try on a VR headset designed to support compliance training programs as well as other workplace activities.  It was a very interesting experience that, due to voice commands, engaged me in talking to the people in my virtual world and their responding time was based on my voice repeating the scripted content I selected as the right answer.  It was an amazing experience.  It was a taste of things to come.  Continued fear of future global health fears and the economic environment will propel these tools into the workplace at lightning speed.  Being wise and aware of the issues that face us as employers and talent acquisition specialists, it is critical to stay future-focused on the technology tools available to help and support our businesses and the Human Resources we need to engage for now and in the future.

Things are never going to go back to the way they were.  We need to keep our eyes focused clearly on staying on the cutting edge of change and incorporating those tools and resources that are available now at a cost that we can afford and continue to leverage technology as it continues to penetrate all corners of the workplace.