The Human Touch: 10 Predictions for HR in 2019

The potential of people analytics is enormous but the risk of getting it wrong and losing employee trust – perhaps irrevocably – is high. All of those who work in the field have a responsibility to ensure that people data is used for good. Fortunately, with the growing trend of providing personalised recommendations and insights to employees in exchange for the personal data that they share with their employers, the field is moving in the right direction. Coupled with a surge in the employee wellness market, expect to see the growth in'personal analytics', whereby workers are given data-driven insights to make better personal and work-related decisions to increase exponentially in 2019. One of the best books I've read in 2018 was Jeffrey Pfeffer's Dying for a Paycheck, which provided a sobering and damning analysis on how our workplaces are literally killing people. Not only do modern management practices engender stress, damage engagement and destroy the mental and physical health of employees, Pfeffer also emphasises the massive harm it causes company performance too. This is why the field of people analytics is so important as is the focus on employee experience and wellness. The methodologies being employed to understand, design and measure employee experience are getting more sophisticated, more data-driven and more wide-ranging. These include active and passive listening tools such as surveys, ONA and wearables plus the analysis of unstructured data (e.g.