COVID One Year Later: Key Trends Reshaping Workforce Technology

By Gautam Sukumar, SVP of Product Management for ADP

The legacy of the past year has been well-documented: workplaces shifted in the face of a global health event, businesses changed their models to adapt, and many workers remain in transition as circumstances continue to evolve. Homes have transformed from living spaces into remote offices and classrooms, reshaping the very way people live and work.

As significant as the changes have been, employers and employees have shown their resilience, looking to digital solutions to help them adapt. As businesses define a new path forward post-pandemic, here are the key trends that will continue to reshape the world of work and the technology that drives it:

The Return to the Workplace

The resilience of the workforce and the safety of workers will continue to be a focus as more businesses begin bringing people back into the workplace more regularly. Employers will prioritize the need of workers in order to ensure a safe return. This will require putting protocols in place to limit potential exposure and support employees as they adapt to new environments and routines.

Mobile tools are allowing businesses leaders to stay connected to their workforce and make actionable decisions in near real-time. Through employee readiness surveys and health attestations, considered against the latest pandemic data, businesses can make more informed decisions on who to bring back and the right timelines for doing so to ensure comfort and safety. Additionally, technology including touchless time kiosks that use facial recognition and voice commands can help transform workforce management practices in a way that will likely become the norm.

More Flexibility

The global health event has caused a huge jump in employees who work from home. According to recent findings from the ADP Research Institute, about 44% of employers now have flexible working policies, up from just 24% pre-pandemic. For many workers who have found value in the remote work experience, it’s a trend they hope to continue post-pandemic. In fact, most workers (65%) say they’re upbeat about the flexible opportunities they will have in the future. This enhanced flexibility could result in the ability for workers to carry out their responsibilities from virtually any location rather than popular business hubs with higher costs of living.

Having a greater number of employees online simultaneously means that both companies and workers could face the need to upgrade their hardware and back-end systems sooner than they otherwise would have. Over the past year, some of the biggest cloud providers saw surging use. With more happening on the cloud, the need to prioritize tech to support workers will increase. We will also see more companies expecting software as a service providers to enhance their offerings with personalized, worker-centric value-adds that make working remote less challenging and more productive.

The Demand for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

The global health event, economic downturn and demands for social justice have put workplace equality and fairness in the spotlight. Many companies have long made diversity a priority, but there is an increasing demand for greater action from employers to advance diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within the workforce. In fact, from ADP data, employer searches for data insights on the racial and cultural demographics of their workforce increased 74% year-over-year, while searches for gender-based demographics increased by 42%. Businesses will turn to experts to help them find opportunities, establish goals and map a plan for progress.

As companies place a greater focus on DEI, the keys to successful change will be data and transparency. Companies must have transparency into their people data to identify gaps and formulate an actionable plan to address them. As solutions evolve, more companies will turn to data and technology that tracks transparency to institute positive change throughout their operational chains.

Increased Complexity in Compliance

As the regulatory environment grows more complex, there is additionally a significant need for transparency in the compliance space. New legislative changes are in many ways presenting new challenges to businesses as they look to navigate forward and seek essential relief. In many instances, this has placed an added burden on HR and payroll departments. To streamline compliance-related tasks, companies will turn to data-driven compliance tools that can add efficiency and help focus attention where it’s most needed. For example, when the Payroll Protection Program started, ADP was able to proactively create the reports businesses needed to apply for the stimulus program through its cloud-based offering. This helped free up HR managers’ times to focus on more people-related tasks that have only become more essential in today’s operating environment.

The Need for Agility

The tech world is no stranger to innovation, and it seems the pandemic has given many businesses the opportunity to reinvent themselves and people the courage to forge their own paths. To navigate a fluctuating economic environment and a business landscape punctuated by the uncertainty of the global health event, many businesses are changing their models to adapt as they operate. Consider the organizations who are reskilling and redeploying workers to service different areas of the business as they experience shifts in supply and demand. Likewise, consider the local restaurants that shifted from in-house dining to takeout and delivery. Workers themselves are responding to today’s challenges with agility too. In fact, new business applications through late November 2020 were up 37.5% over the same period in 2019, according to Census Bureau data.

To drive true transformation, businesses will focus in on their people and technology that can support new ways of working. Robust and scalable, cloud-based solutions can help unite a dispersed workforce and offer greater transparency into how work is getting done. As artificial intelligence and machine learning unlock the value of data, it’s essential for businesses to implement the solutions that will deliver the most intelligent and actionable insights to drive decision-making in the future.

While the events of the past year have certainly transformed the workforce in foundational ways, that change has unveiled continued opportunities to innovate. Through technology that can streamline processes and enhance productivity, introduce greater flexibility, and increase transparency, we can build a better world of work where everyone can reach their full potential.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

Other Topics

Technology