Yes, the pandemic has turned everything upside down – society, companies and people management. But over the two years that the coronavirus has been with us, paradigms have also shifted: Today, in 2022, we have vaccines and medicines against the disease. While certain areas of our lives may return to a pre-pandemic state, other changes are likely to prevail in the long term. We have ventured a forecast of how society and companies will transform in 2022 – and what implications this will have for people management.

In the following, we propose six environmental and driver factors in society and companies. From these, we in turn derive six people trends for the year 2022. Certainly, these factors and trends can only represent an excerpt of the numerous changes in the post-pandemic world and global economy. Alone, they outline lines of support for HR professionals to set and sharpen their HR function’s agenda for the weeks and months ahead.

6 People Management Trends in 2022

First, these people trends suggest that the HR function should prioritize management and core processes with critical impact and professionalism requirements in both its resource allocation and skill profiles: These certainly include strategic workforce planning and people analytics, corporate culture and leadership model, as well as change management and organizational development for the strategically oriented management processes, or sourcing, recruiting and onboarding, and talent and learning management for the core processes around the employee lifecycle. In addition to conceptual optimization, each process should also be IT-based or digitally captured in order to be able to describe and design the user experience holistically.

We will closely follow these people trends and examine them for their innovation potential in people management. In doing so, we would like to identify and discuss possible directions for the transformation of the HR function in 2022.

Read more concerning this topic: HR Transformation.

Do you have any questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us:

Prof. Dr. Walter Jochmann | Mail: Walter.Jochmann@kienbaum.de | Phone: +49 221 801 72-550

Frank Stein | Mail: Frank.Stein@kienbaum.de | Phone: +49 221 801 72 394