People analytics and mental well-being to gain favour in the 2018 workplace, as Millennials take over and a shrinking talent pool fiercens the competition for hiring the very best. Contributor Chieu Cao, CMO and Co-Founder – Perkbox.

Millennials will no longer be the ‘misunderstood’ generation. The generation that values personal development and work-life balance over money and status will continue to nab the most influential roles and lead organisations in 2018.

People analytics will become an integral part of HR practice. With 77% of business leaders believing in its importance, HR will use increasingly accessible people data to eliminate subjectivity in business-critical people decisions.

A shrinking talent pool will lead to recruitment wars. As the population ages and jobs become ever more specialised, competition for talent will fiercen. Differentiation will not only be a concern for customer, but employee too. The mental wellbeing of employees will become a boardroom issue. Numerous research including the Government’s recently published Thriving at Work report, will lead to a heightened alertness to employee mental wellbeing

Perkbox predicts people analytics and mental wellbeing will gain favour this 2018, as the workplace becomes ever more important to employers. The shrinking talent pool will lead to recruitment wars and we’ll finally hear the end of millennials being talked about as a new and mysterious force in the workplace. A large number of them will take the reins in organisations, and with tech natives in positions of power, we’ll see a greater adoption of creative solutions to old workplace problems.

In the not so distant past, it wasn’t uncommon for larger organisations to be unaware of the exact number of people who worked for them. Today, in stark contrast, many are able to comfortably track data on skills (and their shortages), personal performance, personal performance, personalities and even happiness and culture.

As people data becomes increasingly accessible to HR professionals, it will become a critical resource to eliminate the subjectivity in business-centric people decisions. The challenge: just because something can be measured doesn’t mean it can give you the answer to things. 2018 will see businesses take a more sophisticated approach in turning this information into meaningful metrics. Data will help us improve our organisation’s agility, capability, innovation and, ultimately, bottom line revenue.

As the population ages and jobs become increasingly specialised, we’ll also see the competition for talent fiercen in 2018. Some 60% of HR and recruitment professionals anticipate that in the next three years we’ll experience increased difficulty in recruiting senior and skilled employees as a direct result of Brexit. Employers will want to invest more in their people and promote more inclusive and fulfilling experiences. Office perks, rewards and recognition platforms, unlimited holidays – and much more – will become invaluable differentiation tools for businesses demonstrating they care about their employees more than their competitors do.

We’ve seen an increased focus on mental wellbeing in 2017, with numerous reports released on the subject – perhaps most notably the Government’s Thriving at Work report. We are likely to see more employers take action on this topic and fundamentally re-imagining the role that work plays in our lives. In 2018 initiatives such as developing greater mental health awareness in workplaces and encouraging a healthier work-life balance will become a number one priority.

 Chieu Cao, CMO and Co-Founder of Perkbox, comments: “As millennials rise in the workplace, the stigma of becoming a flaky job-hopper has become a thing of the past. This has come at a time when skills and good ideas are at an all-time premium posing difficulty to businesses which also have to fill specialist roles from a shrinking talent pool. The fear of Brexit’s impact in the UK also adds to this challenge.

“Fortunately 2017 has been a year where we’ve started scrutinising just about every HR practice we have in place, with many on their way of being reinvented completely. 2018 will be an exciting year where we see organisations – particularly larger ones – lean on these new resources to strive for differentiation and overcome some of the biggest problems of talent retention of this day and age”.