What must HR leaders prioritize in 2024?

HR leaders have faced significant challenges this year spurred on by return-to-office efforts from many organizations, unsettled employer/employee relationships, and the rise of generative AI.

As we look to 2024, work will continue to evolve and so will the challenges.

To continue to drive business performance next year, HR leaders are focusing on several key priorities:

1. Prioritizing the development of business leaders

According to the latest Gartner research, one of the top priorities for HR leaders in 2024 is leader and manager development.

This need is most acute for managers, who now have 51% more responsibilities than they can manage. Perhaps even more concerning is that 48% of managers at organizations are at risk of failure.

Organizations have traditionally tackled manager issues by providing further development, and Gartner research found that 59% of HR leaders reported that they plan to increase investment in manager development programs in the next two years.

However, we’ve found that more training does not equate to increased effectiveness. In fact, training can often be seen as just ‘one more thing’ managers need to do.

Nearly 60% of managers reported spending significant time on tasks they qualify as ‘work to do work’, making it less likely for them to upskill due to time constraints.

Training also can’t drive motivation, and it can’t always create the behavioral changes required for today’s roles and responsibilities.

For example, despite considerable time, effort, and energy in training managers on empathy and fairness skills, only half of employees say their manager treats them accordingly.

In response, HR leaders need to focus on making the manager’s job more manageable, ensuring their role is focused, executable, and sustainable.

This is five times more effective than skills proficiency in improving manager effectiveness.

Organizations need to lighten the load by resetting role expectations and removing process hurdles and, simultaneously, they must support managers to build new habits that lead to desired behaviors.

2. Measuring and driving culture

Another top priority for HR leaders in 2024 is organizational culture.

Gartner’s research found that HR leaders feel they don’t effectively measure culture or know how to drive culture change.

HR leaders know that without a strong culture, one that employees are both aligned and connected to, organizations will struggle to attract and retain talent and to achieve desired business outcomes.

The first step to ensuring employees are aligned with the organization’s culture is for HR to know what they are trying to achieve, for example, employee retention or customer-centricity.

Then HR must help employees align to the culture via three distinct elements: employees need to know what the culture is, they must believe the culture is right for the organization and they should also demonstrate behaviors aligned with it.

Equally, HR leaders must focus on cultural connectedness.

With many organizations adopting remote and hybrid working models, they can no longer rely on in-person interactions (i.e., osmosis) to build employees’ connection to company culture.

In response, they must be intentional in how they arrange interactions and create a culture for a hybrid environment, and they must ensure employees identify with, care about, and feel they belong to this culture.

3. Embracing innovative technology

Another important priority for HR leaders in 2024 is the adoption and implementation of emerging technologies.

More than two-thirds (76%) of HR leaders say they will be lagging in organizational success if they don’t quickly adopt AI tools.

But, before any tech investment is made HR leaders must understand how evolving tech trends, such as the adoption and development of generative AI, will impact their organization and talent.

Initial questions that HR needs to determine answers to include:

• Who will own, maintain and manage the technology?
• How will this technology impact current versus future ways of working?
• What are the vendor/in-house options? Are there any mitigations or ethical considerations to navigate?

As HR leaders prioritize the adoption of AI tools in 2024, addressing key questions about technology ownership, impact on work dynamics, and ethical considerations will be crucial for ensuring organizational success and innovation.

4. Fighting change fatigue

One fairly common theme we are hearing from HR leaders is that employees are burnt out.

A recent Gartner survey found that 77% of HR leaders reported that their employees are suffering from change-related fatigue.

This can have significant impacts on talent outcomes; change fatigue can cause employee intent to stay with their employer to decline by as much as 42%, while employee performance can drop by as much as 27%.

HR must proactively manage change fatigue by educating the workforce on fatigue drivers and equipping managers to detect potential hotspots before major problems arise.

HR leaders should also build psychological safety into teams and invite employees to co-create change strategies, thereby boosting motivation and understanding.

And finally, they should facilitate candid change conversations with employees while demonstrating empathy.

5. Creating agile and bespoke career paths for employees

Many employees’ career paths at their organizations are unclear, according to nearly 90% of HR leaders, with two-thirds adding that the career paths at their organization are not compelling for many employees.

Meanwhile, less than one in three employees knows how to progress in their careers over the next five years and just one in four employees are confident about their career at their current organization.

Progressive organizations are addressing this by shifting away from a sole focus on traditional linear career development to designing more agile career paths that reflect the roles and skills that are constantly changing along with employees’ desires and realities.

To retain top talent, employers need to rethink the role of job descriptions and organization charts and focus more on employee skills and experiences.

The only constant is change

What is clear is that for HR leaders, 2024 is going to present new challenges.

Far-reaching structural alterations, modifying employee expectations, and evolving business objectives will all need to be aligned.

What is clear is that the only constant for HR managers will be continuous change.